Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdoherty | Hacker News Reader

Take note that this is a privacy policy for a preliminarily reviewed add-on (only reviewed for basic security issues) and most likely written in jest.

View on HN

According to one of the comments the add-in rewrites amazon searches to provide affiliate income to the authors of the extension. So, it may not be in jest. I certainly wouldn't use this extension.

I don't see any problem with affiliate links.

We do we think that we are totally entitled to someone's work, be it a plugin or anything, but have problems giving back even in the totally easy, transparent and of no cost to us method of affiliate links?

I'm not talking about this add-on or comment in particular, I'm talking a animosity I see towards affiliate links in general.

Affiliate links seem OK if your website is actually driving traffic to e.g. Amazon.com, but simply rewriting every link to Amazon.com on any page (even ones that already were someone else's legit affiliate links) seems a bit abusive.

Do you really want to be a victim of an arms race where every extension tries to outdo all other extensions when it comes to rewriting affiliate links, etc?

Definitely funny as hell though! I like the part about looking at me through my webcam. I am more prone to try this product now than I would be after reading a normal privacy policy. This may be a jab at mozilla also as they REQUIRE a privacy policy for every addon.

Privacy policies are entirely optional for add-ons unless they do something with user data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com