Making a product to explicitly skirt agreements while working for a corporation is ... a choice
Possibly a version of, “I lack the freedom to operate with a moral code at work because I’m probably replaceable, the job market makes me anxious, my family’s well-being and healthcare are tied to having a job, and I don’t believe the government has my back.”
In industries like this there’s also a mindset of “Who cares, it’s all going to corporations anyway, why not send some of that money to the corporation that writes my paychecks?”
An architect or engineer is expected to signal and object to an unsafe design, and is expected by their profession (peers, clients, future employers) to refuse said work even if it costs them their job. This applies even to professions without a formalized license board.
If you don't have the guts and ability to act ethically (and your field will let you get away with it), you're just a code monkey and not a professional software developer.
Ultimately it was only used to install malware in the form of browser extensions, typically disguised as an installer for some useful piece of software like Adobe Acrobat. It would guide you through installing some 500 year old version of Acrobat and sneakily unload the rest of the garbage for which we would be paid, I don't know, 25 cents to a couple dollars per install. Sneaking Chrome onto people's machines was great money for a while. At one point we were running numbers of around $150k CAD per day just dumping trash into unsuspecting people's computers.
At no point in the development of that technology were we told it was going to ruin countless thousands of people's browsers or internet experiences in general. For quite a while the CEO played a game with me where I'd find bad actors on the network and report them to him. He'd thank me and assure me they were on top of figuring out who was behind it. Eventually I figured out that the accounts were in fact his. They let me go shortly after that with generous severance.
I don't miss anything about ad tech. It was such a disheartening introduction to the software world. It's really the armpit and asshole of tech, all at once.
My experience with the people around me who are in this situation is rather either:
- They just don't care. Society and others are not on their radar.
- They don't think it's that bad.
- They think it's not great, but the benefit is too good so they ignore the voice at the back of their head. Or they have a lifestyle and that takes priority.
- They think it's bad, but the friction to live according to their own moral view of the world is higher than their desire to adhere to such a moral view.
When I was 20, I declined interview offers from Facebook and Google. Huge opportunity cost. My friends looked at me like I was dumb.
I have friends regularly coming to me with ideas that are about spamming, selling personal data or basically fraud. They don't see a problem with it.
When you talk to people and say "advertising is basically normalized lying at the scale of the entire society", people just give you a blank stare.
There is no need to look for coercion every time you see something bad to explain it. The human population is diverse and they all draw the line of what's acceptable in different places.
It's not rocket science.
There are times when a product design needs to be reviewed and approved by someone who cares more about his license than about his job. It doesn't happen as often with software as it does with civil engineering, but often enough that it needs to become a thing.
everyone sets the bar below what they do
>even I think that they crossed a line with this
everyone sets the bar below what they do
>I would genuinely like to know what the engineers thought when doing design reviews for a "selective stand down" feature. There doesn't seem to be a legit way to spin it.
everyone sets the bar below what they do
“The Dark Pattern by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage teaches us about the power of context, which is stronger than reason, values, morals, and best intentions. It is an uncomfortable and painful lesson about the root causes of 'corporate infernos.' "
The context matters.
Think of the banality of evil in WW2 Germany.
We are capable of doing almost anything, good or bad, as long as the shoal around does it and pretends it normal.
First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics.
Uber developed a software tool called "Greyball" to avoid giving rides to known law enforcement officers in areas where its service was illegal such as in Portland, Oregon, Australia, South Korea, and China. The tool identified government officials using geofencing, mining credit card databases, identifying devices, and searches of social media. Uber stated that it only used the tool to identify riders that violated its terms of service, after investigations by the United States Department of Justice, Uber admitted to using the tool to facilitate violations of local regulations by obstructing law enforcement investigations of their illegal operations.
There were no criminal consequences for Uber (however, it reportedly contributed to a 2 year hiatus from London due to rejection of operating license renewal). So Honey may have decided the risk level was acceptable.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13785564
1: https://archive.is/DzQha ( https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr... )
2: https://archive.is/tqk3W ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-... )
It's not like any crime was committed, and civil liability falls squarely on the business here, not its employees. And the whole dispute is only about which marketing company receives marketing revenue - something where the world would improve if they all disappeared overnight. Doesn't really seem that evil to me. Underhanded, yes.
I think the only reason there's any outrage at all, outside the affiliate marketing "industry", is that some of these marketing companies are YouTube personalities with whom many people have parasocial relationships. Guess what, they just got to learn the hard way why capitalism sucks. What Honey did is a valid move in the game of business. Businesses throughout history have gained success by doing way worse things than this. Amazon's MFN clause is way worse. Uber's Greyball is way worse.
Yes, thank you for making the web objectively worse for everyone. Yo should feel bad.
You'd think that if you were an engineer building and maintaing a system like this, you'd have an "are we the baddies?" moment, but guess not.
Their personal site is also linked in the video description https://www.benedelman.org/honey-detecting-testers/
When you can't escape an evil system you just have to do your best within it, while either working to get out of it or working to improve it however you can. What more can anyone ask of you? Capitalism is pretty much inescapable, but thankfully I'm not convinced that capitalism is an evil system inherently, it just needs strong constraints and regulations to keep it from being used to do evil things.
The conclusion was that affiliate marketing claimed a lot of sales in their reporting, but the brand was strong enough (this company was #2 by market share in the country and #1 on most brand metrics) to get those customers without affiliate links.
Is it the archive at fault or is the original webpage this way?
Works for me here, and in 90% of the cases where someone complains of annoying page behaviour (cookie banners, revenue optimizations, subscription solicitations, "click here to ...", paywalls, ads, et alii ad nauseam).
Seriously, just disable JavaScript on unknown/untrusted/undeserving sites. It makes the web tolerable.
Don’t recall precisely how it was dead, but I assumed via traffic.
It seems to be loading fine now.
Recently, he released 2 more parts with more new information that paints Honey in a pretty bad light: https://youtu.be/qCGT_CKGgFE https://youtu.be/wwB3FmbcC88
- The Honey browser extension inserted their own affiliate link at checkout, depriving others of affiliate revenue.
- Honey collected discount codes entered by users while shopping online, then shook down website owners to have the discount codes removed.
- Honey should have "stood down" if an affiliate link was detected, but their algorithm would decide to skip the stand down based on if the user could be the an affiliate representative testing for compliance.
Allegedly.
Re the third point, the algorithm would skip stand down for users who weren't likely to be testers (based on account history and lack of cookies for affiliate marketing admin panels).
Obviously Internet affiliate marketing schemes are built on mutual exploitation of asymmetric data collection. This cannot possibly surprise anyone.
With that said, this is a good article with excellent data collection and evidence presentation. It's great to have documentation of obviously corrupt practices, even if they are unsurprising.
This also makes me think that the whole campaign is astroturfed. The only "victims" of Honey are influencers and storefronts, who of course will do their part in trying to get their customers to stop using the product, but for the consumer there really are only benefits with using the extension.
The only arguments against Honey is that they are supposedly breaking some internal rules of the advertising industry (and who cares about those? Certainly not me) and that they are offering deals better than the store wants to offer to you, which makes an extremely compelling case for using that extension.
I always considered extensions like Honey to be quite scammy and believed that they offered little benefit, but apparently I was wrong.
The same could be said about yt-dlp. They know what they are doing youtube doesn't like. But yt-dlp itself is legal.
I hear there is lots of fraud where bees honey is mixed with sugars and sold off as “honey”.
I’m disappointed this is about a browser plugin that no body in their right mind should be using at all.
I mean, fraud in online advertising? Say it ain't so!
"Who gets a kickback on this toothbrush" is a much MUCH less important question than "do you pollute the air we are all breathing".
It's not about the severity of the impact, its the fact that they were breaking the rules and explicitly coding to actively avoid being caught by testers.
Of course I agree that health is more important than affiliate commissions. So the comparison only goes so far.
