At this rate Steve is going to end up offed or cancelled in some kind of way, he keeps digging deeper.
They are running a drama/scandal focussed channel. Of course they are going to be controversial at times.
investigative journalism is drama now 👍
Just to make a more meta comment, this is a case where cynicism is definitely not helping. We need better journalists to do this kind of deep dive without concern for losing a revenue stream. And not just in gaming hardware, either.
If we cynically label every journalist that does it as “drama mongers”, we’re only hurting ourselves.
Not really. Reviews and weekly news are still their bread and butter. They do a few of these deep dive investigations per year.
And they do very detailed reviews.
LegalEagle and Wendover Productions actually beat them to the punch (Nebula) on this. They filed on 29th December 2024, a whole 4 days earlier.
And since the US courts charge money to get these documents, I downloaded a copy of the complaint earlier on my PACER account so anyone who’s interested can read it without incurring the stupid fees. Enjoy
Edit: Devin Stone (the host of LegalEagle) is actually a lawyer on this case. His name and his law firm are listed as a lawyer for the plaintiff on the complaint.
In GN’s video the law firm mentioned there are 3-4 cases already and they are probslably getting combined or go to the same judge. (IANAL; IDK the specifics)
I am genuinely concerned about this because Legal Eagle’s suit is directly tied to manipulating URLs and cookies. The suit, even with its focus on last click attribution, doesn’t make an incredibly specific argument. If Legal Eagle wins, this sets a very dangerous precedent for ad blockers being illegal because ad blockers directly manipulate cookies and URLs. I haven’t read the Gamer’s Nexus one yet.
Please note that I’m not trying to defend Honey at all. They’re actively misleading folks.
It could never apply to ad blockers. You install an ad blocker knowing that it will block stuff… and explicitly WANTING it to do so.
Nobody installed honey knowing that it was manipulating cookies and stuff. The normal layperson who installs it will just think “It’s just chucking in coupon codes into that box!”…
One is predicated on a lie of omission… the other is literally what the user wants. There’s a huge difference…
I understand why you would think that, but this is not the case. Not a lawyer though, not legal advice.
There are 2 main types of causes of action for this, let’s go over them:
- Conversion, unjust enrichment: Here, Legal eagle and other creators allege Honey took money that was supposed to go to them. Basically just theft. This does not apply to adblock, since they don’t take the money.
- Tortious interference: Here they claim, that by removing the tracking cookie, they unlawfully interfere with the business relationship between the affiliates and the shopping platform. This could maybe apply to ad-blockers, but it is almost certainly superseded by the user explicitly wanting to remove tracking cookies, and the user has the right to do so. Saying that it is unlawful interference is like saying a builder hired by a land owner to build a fence is interfering with truckers who were using the land as a shortcut. They had no legal right to pass through the land in the first place. So the owner can commission a fence and a builder can build it. A contract between the truckers and amazon would not matter. In case of honey, it is like the builder was not hired by the owner and just built the fence to spite the truckers without owners permission.
That’s like saying bank robberies being illegal mean that going to the bank is illegal.
Honey is unlawful because of what they DO by changing those URLs and cookies, e.g enriching themselves at the expense of creators.
Your analogy doesn’t work at all.
If one of the core harms is the removal of income and tracking, ad blockers fall into this category. Ad blockers very explicitly remove these things. The harm is not “Honey stole my income” it’s “Honey removed my tracking and Honey added their tracking.” Read the Legal Eagle case.
I have read the case.
I don’t enrich myself by using an adblocker. And I certainly don’t enrich myself at other’s expense.
I think it’ll be okay, Honey was actually making money from the manipulation without user knowlage.
Adblocks don’t make money and users are (should be) aware that tracking links and stuff gets removed.
But adblockers don’t enable unlawful enrichment. Or do they?
Only paid ones. Theoretically could impact Brave, for instance.
There is no reason why the complaint can’t be specific to modifying just attribution and commission cookies. And ad blockers mostly work by blackholing DNS request to ad servers and manually editing DOM and removing elements that load content from known ad services. If an ad blocking extension modifies cookies it’s typically just blocking them entirely (something every browser has built in) not editing them.
I use uBlock Origin to remove tracking. I also manually remove tracking. Privacy Badger is a tool that works to explicitly do this kind of tidying.
I think we can agree that modifying a cookie such as that Honey does to steal commissions and blocking a cookie in its entirety as a security or privacy measure are material different actions.
So I find the concerns that Honey getting sued and having to pay damages could open up ad blockers to getting sued overblown.
You can quantify damages equal to the amount of commissions paid on purchases actually made in Honey’s case (and on the consumer side with the difference in discounts provided by Honey withholding the best coupons it claims to provide)
You can’t quantify damages made by blocking ads or tracking cookies as advertisement and tracking doesn’t directly translate to sales
IIRC Legal Eagle is suing on the side of retailers that have been harmed by the plugin, while this one is more on the side of consumers. They still might end up combined.
But ad blockers aren’t doing that to divert revenue to another party
Shit’s getting real in Honey’s legal department.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this investigation on Honey (20 minutes, Part 1):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk
It’s fascinating stuff. Open fraud.
I can’t speak for formal legal matters (I am assuming such scams are nominally legal in the US), but it goes to show that senior PayPal executives are basically criminals. There is no way they didn’t know about this.
I mean, Paypal is a bank that isn’t beholden to all the normal bank regulations and customer protection rules due to technicalities. They have been caught effectively seizing customer funds through locking accounts for questionable reasons before, and offer no reasonable way of recovering funds from locked accounts. Numerous stories of people operating online etsy (and similar) storefronts getting accounts locked for vague claims they were actively money laundering, with no means for appeal.
Anyone just now becoming aware of the paypal execs’ corruption hasn’t been paying attention.
There’s a reason that a set of grifters who ran the place is nicknamed “The Paypal Mafia”.
In a short 10-15 years we will see a resolution to this case and be able to have closure. A blink of a eye.
