Amazon takes a swipe at Honey, PayPal’s $4B acquisition | Hacker News Reader

Amazon takes a swipe at Honey, PayPal’s $4B acquisition

arstechnica.com

95 pointsDeinos47 comments

> “Honey tracks your private shopping behavior, collects data like your order history and items saved, and can read or change any of your data on any website you visit,”

Amazon does all three of these things, especially when you check out the Chrome Web Store page for the "Amazon Assistant for Chrome." In fact that particular web extension requires more permissions than Honey:

Display Notifications, Read and change your bookmarks, Detect your physical location, and Manage your apps, extensions and themes (I wonder if it uninstalls Honey!).

Honey's Privacy Policy doesn't say they can track data from any website you visit:

> Honey does not track your search engine history, emails, or your browsing on any site that is not a retail website (a site where you can shop and make a purchase). When you are on a pre-approved retail site, to help you save money, Honey will collect information about that site that lets us know which coupons and promos to find for you. We may also collect information about pricing and availability of items, which we can share with the rest of the Honey community.

> What data we do not collect

> We collect information that we believe can help us save our users time and money. This does not include, and we do not collect, any information from your search engine history, emails, or from websites that are not retail sites.

Now, I'd never join Honey as it is a service that's too invasive for my own standards. However, Amazon is also blatantly lying about Honey - Honey only seems to read website data from whitelisted shopping sites.

The beauty of the CCPA is that you can request data for yourself and confirm what Honey actually collects and compare with what they state they collect.

No need to speculate who is right at this point based on privacy policy statements that may or may not be outdated or not totally comprehensive.

Do we not expect a disconnect between stated collection and what's dumped? Why wouldn't they collect everything, state minimal, and dump (on request) the minimal they state?

Because they’d be breaking the law if they hid data about you they’re legally compelled to share with you if requested

This matters if they get caught and if the fine is more than the profit. Given the track record of Corporate America, I see no reason to believe the legality of the situation will result in truthful disclosure.

You have to take into account impact to future revenue. Even if the fine is less than existing profits, if it tanks the business then its not worth it.

You'd also have to find some employees who were comfortable to keep this hidden.

Especially considering if they were caught it’s the lower level employees who will go to jail as sacrificial lambs

Cynical answer: that requires a lot more discipline around data tagging and processing and dumping-on-request than most "move fast" internet companies can do.

A company that could do that would, from an engineering perspective, be a refreshing change from all the others that are like "shit, we don't even know all the places we might have stored information." :D

>Do we not expect a disconnect between stated collection and what's dumped? Why wouldn't they collect everything, state minimal, and dump (on request) the minimal they state?

That's exactly what we expect. See Ruben Verborgh's tale in trying to retrieve his full data from Facebook, not just the summaries we're already presented with in the app - https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

Thank you so much for sharing this. I read a couple of further posts on Ruben’s site and found that he holds very very similar views on data privacy and decentralisation as I do. Very worthwhile time spent.

That requires you trust the Privacy Policy

PayPal has proven to be an untrustworthy company and has only maintained their market dominance via regulatory capture that more or less prevents any competitors from forming

The nice thing about Chrome add ons is that you can have them turned off by default. You can turn them on by just clicking on them when you visit a specific website.

When Honey was acquired, I wondered why it was valued at $4B when all it does is apply coupon codes. Now it is clear - it's the data.

Look at https://www.joinhoney.com/ - they make no effort to tell you that they track / store all your order data across websites !

So they likely have access to info PayPal doesnt. So how much does PayPal make from selling financial data then?

It is always the data. Everyone stores everything these days, even if it is not immediately acted upon/sold. If it is not immediately used, it is still a bargaining chip for valuations/acquisitions.

Yep data is more valuable than oil.

I think the Stratechery article on the acquisition is paywalled, but I liked his explanation that while paypal positions this as a consumer play, its about the demand gen value they could create for paypal merchants. Amazon's opposition seems to align with this thesis.

Yeah, users get their discount codes and Honey gets money from the shops who gave discount code away, then got $4B acquisition. Sounds not right, too sweet to be real.

No kidding. Obviously Amazon has some impure motives here but the credulous way this article treats Honey's claims should be journalistic malpractice.

The first time I encountered this was when one of our devs was having trouble with CSP violations in development. Turns out the honey chrome extension injecting scripts was the problem!

Add to this, many YouTube personalities push Honey. Most notably Mr Beast. A significant chunk of their audience is under 18. I wonder when this will blow up in their face - lawyers will have a field day suing PayPal.

Assuming you're alluding to COPPA, isn't the age < 13 whereby it becomes an issue with storing their personal information?

Regardless, on Amazon you need to be at least 13 years old to make your own account.

When they ask me how I knew it was a market top, I will tell them a Chrome extension sold for $4 billion.

I’ve been saying that since two years ago. This bull market has been one of the greatest artificial run in history. OR it could be that we’ve been conditioned to think this way based on the dotcom lores and permanent risk-aversion stemming from the financial crisis. I personally believe the incredible rise in standard of living across the globe is something people in the investment community do not talk about enough. And that is how I come to terms with the past decade.

Or QE was essentially money printing that rippled through the shadow banking system in such a way that the price of certain assets (companies/stocks, real estate) are inflating indefinitely.

This times a thousand.

Im constantly torn between 'new highs for years' vs 'but we had 2 bubbles see how those went?'

In the same boat. Each dollar I move from equity to cash I feel a little safer and a little more foolish.

Honey's revenue is $100 million and growing by 100% a year.

How is $4 billion overvalued for them?

They have 17 million users and they aggregate shopping data of everything those users purchase online from any shopping website.

There are certainly other economic indicators of a bubble but this is not one of them. A giant payment processing company like PayPal has a lot of reasons to "overpay" for a company like Honey, including the fact that they could have Honey prioritize retailers that use PayPal.

Maybe the implication is that it’s a weak product because it depends on a third party platform to continue functioning. If chrome eliminated extensions tomorrow, or changed its TOS so honey would be in violation, what would honey do?

That's actually why it makes sense for them to join PayPal which has a lot more influence.

Chrome could change their extension policies and put a severe damper on the business overnight. Consumers would have the option to use a different browser, but it's likely that many of the Honey users did not affirmatively register for an account and are using the extension passively. Enough of a relationship exists between Paypal and Google, and the Honey extension doesn't particularly bother Google to begin with, that this is probably an acceptable risk for them. But it was notable to me that such a healthy premium was paid for a business built almost entirely on a browser platform.

There’s zero value for a retailer when you’re applying coupon codes at checkout. I don’t see why retailers will continue to tolerate it.

Not true.. coupons get customers in the door.

> When they ask me how I knew it was a market top, I will tell them a Chrome extension sold for $4 billion.

A business sold for $4 billion.

Saying "a Chrome extension sold for $4 billion" is like saying "a software engineer gets a $250K salary for typing".

a Chrome extension that made between $250 and $300 million revenue in 2019...

A Chrome extension that collected shopping data from 17+ million people

PayPal acquirer honey for the data of course but I still believe it will be a write off in a couple years. Those kind of browser extensions are really low user retention a doing term something will come along and people just move on to it. Their users all are price sensitive deal hunters and the moment something comes up they will move.

It’s crazy.

- They’re beholden to the extension stores for distribution.

- They probably hijack affiliate links which I personally think is a type of fraud. Regardless of the ethics, it’s detrimental to retailers that allow it because the real people driving traffic will give up.

- They collect data that would otherwise be exclusive to the retailer. Why buy data from Amazon if Honey will sell you the same thing plus a bunch of other related data?

There is ZERO upside for successful retailers like Amazon and a bunch of downside.

Slightly unrelated, but they also faked reviews on chrome. Just compare reviews on Chrome vs reviews on Firefox.

Are there open source equivalents to Honey using APIs from existing websites for more common vendors?

that would be great ! I can't remember its name but I have been tempted to install a similar price tracking extension .. except that it can siphon all my browsing data. hard pass.

An open source app would provide _some_ safety around such a permission

I'd love to see an "app store" of fully (non-obfuscated) open source & vetted browser extensions.

Does Honey sell services to hedge funds?

Most likely. Many, many businesses sell their data to hedge funds through shell companies or 3rd parties that make it extremely difficult to figure out where your data goes.

Any proof?

There’s plenty, to the point asking this question is somewhat indicative you don’t really care.

Here’s an example from The NY Times a few weeks ago that topped HN.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...

Data -> shell -> fund pipeline has been a thing for a decade now at the very least.

I worked at a major quant hedge fund for a while, and my duties involved working with these data sets.

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