Paypal Buys Honey

[Murasaki]

10 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I can tell you why. PayPal wants to not only know what you're actually buying, they also want to know what you're looking at. Because Honey, as far as I know, when it's comparing prices, is feeding into the Honey's engine. So, even if you won't actually pay something that would register with PayPal, they'll get the info what you've been looking at and see your interests. Sort of like buying "trending". Knowing what people look and buy in the end can tell A LOT to a merchant or a manufacturer.

Ah yes the decilous data as usual, thanks for the info.

[dalekphalm]

22 hours ago, zeldatp151 said:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/paypal-to-acquire-shopping-and-rewards-platform-honey-for-4-billion/

"Paypal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash."

"In addition, PayPal’s network of 24 million merchant partners will gain the ability to offer targeted and more personalized promotions to consumers as a means of acquiring new business and driving increased sales."

 

Does this mean I'm going to start getting targeted ads from Honey now? That's how it reads to me. I'm not a fan of this development

That's not how I read it. I interpreted it as targeted discounts (hence "promotions", not advertisements) - the idea being that you're about to checkout with PayPal, and the Merchant has setup an exclusive Honey discount that only PayPal/Honey users can use.

21 hours ago, Fetzie said:

So much for the "Honey doesn't sell your data, they make their profit from commissions on sales made" talking point, I guess.

How is that still not true? Honey didn't sell your data - they were bought out as a whole. Granted, the new owners could decide to change that particular policy - but there's certainly no evidence that it's been changed yet.

19 hours ago, TempestCatto said:

Anytime I use Paypal, specifically with Ebay, somehow my information gets stolen and someone (usually from Russia) buys shit with my Paypal. Then sometimes my Ebay account gets hijacked and I get locked out. Ebay has my account disabled at the moment, so it's "safe" and quite frankly, I don't feel like trying to get it back. I'm done with both of those fucked up services. So I hope I don't have to delete my Honey account and uninstall it.

 

Fucking hell EVERYONE keeps getting bought out? What's next, LMG getting bought out by DHX?

As others have mentioned, this is not usual behaviour. There's some kind of attack vector into one of your systems that they are utilizing. I know you said you scanned your systems, but how else are they repeatedly getting in every time? Even if there was some kind of exploit in Ebay/PayPal, it wouldn't be available every single time and just for you.

 

If you're 100% confident all your systems are clean, you should contact their support and see if they can get to the bottom of it (eg: try and log what IP the malicious purchase happened from).

19 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

It sounds like your computer, phone, or whatever you are making your payments from is infected with some kind of key logger or malware. 

This^

[TempestCatto]

23 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

As others have mentioned, this is not usual behaviour. There's some kind of attack vector into one of your systems that they are utilizing. I know you said you scanned your systems, but how else are they repeatedly getting in every time? Even if there was some kind of exploit in Ebay/PayPal, it wouldn't be available every single time and just for you.

 

If you're 100% confident all your systems are clean, you should contact their support and see if they can get to the bottom of it (eg: try and log what IP the malicious purchase happened from).

I've made purchases from Ebay without using Paypal. In fact that's how most of them were made. I decided to try Paypal and only used it three times, each time having this issue. Two purchases made on my own network at home, one made at work (couldn't pass up the deal). I did contact both Ebay and Paypal but I was only given generic responses. I do not believe there is something infected on my network or devices. 

[IAmAndre]

Which payment method did they use for the transaction?

[justpoet]

PayPal, the company that you couldn’t use with add blockers for a while because they ran internal pages through double click for tracking purposes to market all your transactions and purchased goods at that deep an integration level...yep, your honey data is perfectly safe.

 

Saw this sort of thing coming from a mile away, and thus never got or installed it.  The entire point was to get unique data willingly that was worth enough to be bought out for.

[RejZoR]

I've tried it, never got even 1 cent of discount for anything. Removed it. Must be some American thing because not a single European merchant I've used offered anything. Not even Amazon, usually UK or German branch.

[Founders]

[maartendc]

On 11/21/2019 at 12:10 AM, CTR640 said:

Sure why not. I do like to see ads about honey because I like honey.

I never liked honey. In Firefox it seemed to slow my browsing down immensely.

 

Also it rarely found me better deals. I just use independent price checking websites....

[Mark Kaine]

11 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

Which payment method did they use for the transaction?

Cash! (it's in the article)  

[Uttamattamakin]

If Linus  bought stock in Honey then he may just be doing LTT for the lulz from now on. 

[RejZoR]

I've deleted my Honey account just to be sure.

[P o n e.c.c.c.c.c if I can]

Is it me or are the big company buying of small company that has done a lot of sponsor before?

 

[Ezzy-525]

On 11/21/2019 at 1:43 AM, Brooksie359 said:

There probably is a group of businesses that just watch linus just for ideas in what companies to buy. 

Crap. I watched an old video and accidentally bought Vessel.

[Trik'Stari]

I find it odd how the marketing and advertising bubble never seems to collapse, despite being universally hated.

[hsdjfh]

I never trusted Honey in the first place. How can something free, that's even supposed to save you money, have such a big advertising budget. It feels like a scam

[dalekphalm]

6 hours ago, hsdjfh said:

I never trusted Honey in the first place. How can something free, that's even supposed to save you money, have such a big advertising budget. It feels like a scam

Their business model is that retailers will team up with them for exclusive coupons, and each time you use one of those exclusive coupons, Honey makes a small commission, paid by the company providing said coupon (Eg: Best Buy).

 

The benefit to Best Buy (or whoever), is additional driven sales - and the commission per coupon used is likely tiny anyway.

 

Is that a sustainable business model? I don't know - I'd have to see Honey's balance sheet to know. But it definitely could work without being a scam.

 

Personally I have honey installed, but I disabled it at home because it was never useful. Every time I went to use it, it either couldn't find a coupon, or it was a useless one, like save 1 penny (yes, that happened on Costco) or save 1 dollar.

 

I've never had it find an actual useful coupon.

[Trik'Stari]

10 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Pretty hard when they already infiltrated home screens, phone launchers, browsers, emails, online shopping, social networks, circumvent DNS blocking with DoH, etc. If people had any privacy, targetting ads would be pretty hard and they would probably make less money. As Steve Jobs said in the past, the amount of stuff to block manually in the internet is so big that it is easier to make whitelists than blacklists.

But that's the irony for me.

 

Everyone fucking hates it. EVERYONE. I'm to the point that if an advertisement is particularly annoying, I will deliberately not buy anything from the company, EVER. Even if they are somewhat cheaper than the alternative.

 

Thus, the advertising has had a negative effect, rather than a positive one.

[asquirrel]

I finally installed Honey a few days ago since I was buying a mixer from Kitechaid. The deals it found didn't work. Then I learned it also doesn't work with amazon (in a meaningful way). Now this...I just uninstalled it. Elon's first child really is turning out to be a bit of...well I was going to say spawn of satan, but that'd make Elon satan and I don't hate him at all, much less that much. Hrm... :/

[Shin-Gouki]