Haha, thanks lordkosc. I’ve been using Topcashback, but I should look into Honey sometime. That stacking trick with wallet money is big hackz.
Yep, Honey sent me over a hundred bucks back last year for buying stuff I was going to buy anyway, no idea how they are making money.
I’ve never used their discount before, but just a couple of weeks ago I used the Humble Store discount for the first to pre-order Elden Ring, the new From Software game, for about $48.
No clue, but my guess is to scoop up new users, and later they’ll drop off. Originally I used Ebates/Rakuten, then switched to Topcashback because the Ebates discounts fell off. Now I see more people posting about good Honey discount deals. As long as there are no issues with getting credit for purchases and payoff, it’s probably time for me to switch.
stusser
4497
Honey tracks your buying habits, that’s how it’s monetized. If you feel $100/yr is worth your activity being tracked and datamined, that’s fine, so long as you go in with your eyes open.
Ahh , well they sure must know I like beef jerky and video games. :P
stusser
4499
Yeah, and the hemorrhoid creme you bought on Amazon, etc, etc.
Daagar
4501
For your ability to sit? A gift indeed.
On the one hand, bleh, there’s never been a year of this program that’s been a winner for me every single month, so I’ll probably never see the 20% discount again (and I may well enter with 10% since this month is mostly unappealing to me, although I’m still debating). On the other hand, it only takes 3 months to hit 15%.
Not to derail the thread too much, but they know much, much more about this than that. The chrome plugin sends (at a minimum) every URL you visit to their server (to look for deals) so they know everything you do in chrome, not just what you’ve bought.
stusser
4505
Is this true, did you research it? I suspected as much but was too lazy to look it up.
A while ago I looked into it as much as I could, but it’s easy to figure out just from watching my wife use the plugin. Any website she visited where Honey had a deal it would just “magically” pop up without any action on her part. It can’t do that without sending off a query to their servers that she (who is logged in) accessed website X, are there any deals.
So at a minimum they have to be collecting what user visits what site on the internet (the same model as the ask jeeves and yahoo toolbar of yore). Who knows what else they are collecting and selling.
stusser
4507
Sure they can, they could download a whitelist and only check-in with the server when you visit one of those sites.
Clearly the addon contacts the mothership when you go to Old Navy or Amazon or whatever, the question is whether it also sends telemetry that you’re visiting gayhookups.xyz.
I don’t remember the data from when I looked it up a year or so back, but I doubt it’s using a whitelist. Paypal paid $4b for them back in 2019, and it’s doubtful that valuation was just from old navy being able to surface deals to you when you visit old navy.
stusser
4509
The question here is whether Honey tracks your buying habits or every site you visit in the browser. The former is acceptable, and justified. The latter would be awful.
Directly from the founder’s mouth
George (founder of Honey) here to clarify why we need this data in order to do what we do.
Honey saves people money in 2 ways: 1) automatically applying coupons on the checkout page and 2) giving you extra cash back with every purchase.
In order for Honey to automatically apply coupons on the checkout page, we need to know what page you’re on. This is the only way to appear ONLY when you are on the checkout page.
In order to give our users cash back on their purchase, we need to know that a transaction happened so we can match up the records with merchants.
Honey makes money by getting a commission from merchants and then giving a portion of it back to our user as cash back. We DO NOT sell or share your data in any way.
Hope this clears things up. Happy to answer questions you guys may have.
You can see from the top of the thread showing it sending the full url for youtube to their servers, and since you can’t really buy anything on youtube it’s probably unlikely they are white listed.
stusser
4511
Well you can rent movies and such but yeah, if that’s true I would consider Honey to be spyware.
Paypal bought Honey in 2019 (4 years after the post you referenced) for four billion dollars. They had 17m users at the time, so that’s a valuation of $235 per user. They didn’t pay that kind of money for affiliate cuts. They did it for user data. Tracking.
But Honey only applies to the Application it’s installed on, correct? If I install Honey on Chrome, but use Edge or some other browser for all other day-to-day use, that could mitigate what Honey sees?
Or, which would take a lot less work, I think I could add Honey to Edge, and then leave Chrome alone.
Either would work. I use Edge on my phone and use Chrome on my PC, but I could switch both to Chrome or Edge, and just use Honey on a Browser dedicated to shopping.
And yes, after typing it up, I know it makes no sense that I would use Edge on my Android Phone and Chrome on my Windows PC. I don’t remember how it all happened, but it did, and now I can’t be bothered with fixing anything.
