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For-profit Pie Adblock (from the founder of Honey) called out for copying uBlock Origin open source code without credit (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 163 points 2 years ago (19 children)

"From the founder of Honey." Which means that stealing code and affiliate links is just the surface of shady stuff they are up to.

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  • [–] 62 points 2 years ago (18 children)

    The founder of Honey no longer owns Honey, and hasn't for some time. It's owned by PayPal, a much more notoriously shady company that some people still use for some reason.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Now I feel bad. I use paypal because in some cases of purchases it is the only means I can use. What is shady about them?

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Look up the PayPal mafia. Tldr: their founders are overthrowing the world's oldest democracy at the moment.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    It's the only means you can use because it's the only one the seller provides. Not your fault.

    What is shady? You name it.

    I mean first and foremost they're a public-traded company that you'll see on every storefront on the web, which together basically guarantees unethical business practices.

    They automatically enrolled users into PayPal credit without their knowledge or consent. They advertised $10 free credit for new members, then just...didn't give it. They charge late fees and interest when their shitty servers fail to process payments. They will almost always take the buyer's side in any dispute, regardless of provided evidence, they automatically opt users into data sharing, etc.

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/paypal-pay-25-million-fines-deceptive-shady-business-001516273.html https://www.dailydot.com/debug/stop-paypal-data-sharing/

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    The founder still made it do what it does.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    Depends when all of that functionality was added in. Honey started as a legit coupon scraping extension back in 2012, and was sold to PayPal in 2020. Somewhere in the last 12 years, someone got a bit too greedy.

    Reminds me of the story of AdBlock - helpful extension gets a huge market share, people get greedy, it gets sold to a for-profit, and starts doing shady deals with the people it's supposed to be "working against".

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Um, PayPal paid $4,000,000,000 to buy Honey. $4 billion. Now, think about how much profit Honey would have had to been generating for PP to look at the numbers and buy it for that much. However it "started", the functionality to steal was in there before they sold it to PayPal

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Companies that aren't profitable get bought all the time for ridiculous amounts of money not because they currently make boatloads of money, but because they have a huge userbase and brand recognition, and the buyer thinks they are the geniuses that can make it do that. Yahoo paid 1.1 billion for Tumblr - since sold to wordpress for 3 million - and Musk 44 billion for Twitter - now worth a fraction of that - for example.
    That is exactly why they often go to shit only after they have been bought.

    Fwiw, Honey did around $100 million in revenue back in 2018. That's 40 times less than what they were bought for, and that isn't even profit, but just how much money they received before all their business expenses were paid.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Did you seriously cite a Medium article? C'mon now, it's an open blog where anyone can write anything without any fact checking. Ir's worse than Wikipedia.

    According to a tech crunch article, "As of today, Honey’s 17 million members have saved more than $2 billion to date."

    That translates to a lot of transactions.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    The founder made it steal commissions for a company that they weren't even affiliated with?

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