Comment on Honey has now lost 4 million Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed
Doombot1@lemmy.one 3 days agoLooks like he posted a Patreon update only an hour ago, but I am not subscribed and can’t see what it is. I wonder what he’s saying in that.
NotAnotherLemmyUser@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I was just about to edit my post because I just got done with watching the video. I’ll just give you an overview of what he talked about. It was a 13min video.
It does sound like legal action has already been taken against Jono (MegaLag) in some way since he mentioned that he can’t talk about everything, “There are just some things that I can’t share with you right now”, but that could also just be because he’s still tracking down additional information and doesn’t want any companies to try to cover their tracks while he’s following a lead.
He started off the video by recounting his experience from when he first dropped the video, to the next day when he woke up to notifications from a lot of family, friends, and dms from influencers. He ended up working through Christmas with everything going on.
Ryan Hudson, the founder of Honey, dm’d Jono (MegaLag) on Twitter. He only showed a few screenshots of this conversation (not the whole thing) and mentioned that, by the end of it, Ryan Hudson insinuated that he would be suing Jono.
Ryan also made a Reddit post trying to disparage his investigation: web.archive.org/…/im_ryan_hudson_the_cofounder_of…
He mentioned that there are now 60 class action lawsuits (that expand beyond Honey) which includes people suing Capital One, Klarna, Microsoft, PayPal and RetailMeNot (he was only able to look into about 30 of them).
He mentioned that Google has updated their Affiliate Ads Policy in response to everything. He covers this in more detail on Twitter: xcancel.com/…/1899611189107147223
MegaLag reached out to the FTC asking them to clarify whether Affiliate Marketing disclosures is required for browser extensions. They gave him the run around for a few weeks and eventually replied, “Nothing to say on this one. Sorry.”
MegaLag finished the video talking about how he developed a new browser extension which helps detect Cookie Stuffing (whenever a webpage attempts to drop an affiliate cookie when you wouldn’t expect it). He’s using it now for more investigations. It’s not out yet, but he’s looking to eventually make it public for everyone.