At this rate Steve is going to end up offed or cancelled in some kind of way, he keeps digging deeper.
They are running a drama/scandal focussed channel. Of course they are going to be controversial at times.
Not really. Reviews and weekly news are still their bread and butter. They do a few of these deep dive investigations per year.
And they do very detailed reviews.
I am genuinely concerned about this because Legal Eagle’s suit is directly tied to manipulating URLs and cookies. The suit, even with its focus on last click attribution, doesn’t make an incredibly specific argument. If Legal Eagle wins, this sets a very dangerous precedent for ad blockers being illegal because ad blockers directly manipulate cookies and URLs. I haven’t read the Gamer’s Nexus one yet.
Please note that I’m not trying to defend Honey at all. They’re actively misleading folks.
That’s like saying bank robberies being illegal mean that going to the bank is illegal.
Honey is unlawful because of what they DO by changing those URLs and cookies, e.g enriching themselves at the expense of creators.
There is no reason why the complaint can’t be specific to modifying just attribution and commission cookies. And ad blockers mostly work by blackholing DNS request to ad servers and manually editing DOM and removing elements that load content from known ad services. If an ad blocking extension modifies cookies it’s typically just blocking them entirely (something every browser has built in) not editing them.
I think it’ll be okay, Honey was actually making money from the manipulation without user knowlage.
Adblocks don’t make money and users are (should be) aware that tracking links and stuff gets removed.
IIRC Legal Eagle is suing on the side of retailers that have been harmed by the plugin, while this one is more on the side of consumers. They still might end up combined.
But adblockers don’t enable unlawful enrichment. Or do they?
Only paid ones. Theoretically could impact Brave, for instance.
Shit’s getting real in Honey’s legal department.
LegalEagle and Wendover Productions actually beat them to the punch (Nebula) on this. They filed on 29th December 2024, a whole 4 days earlier.
And since the US courts charge money to get these documents, I downloaded a copy of the complaint earlier on my PACER account so anyone who’s interested can read it without incurring the stupid fees. Enjoy
Edit: Devin Stone (the host of LegalEagle) is actually a lawyer on this case. His name and his law firm are listed as a lawyer for the plaintiff on the complaint.
In GN’s video the law firm mentioned there are 3-4 cases already and they are probslably getting combined or go to the same judge. (IANAL; IDK the specifics)
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this investigation on Honey (20 minutes, Part 1):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk
It’s fascinating stuff. Open fraud.
I can’t speak for formal legal matters (I am assuming such scams are nominally legal in the US), but it goes to show that senior PayPal executives are basically criminals. There is no way they didn’t know about this.
I mean, Paypal is a bank that isn’t beholden to all the normal bank regulations and customer protection rules due to technicalities. They have been caught effectively seizing customer funds through locking accounts for questionable reasons before, and offer no reasonable way of recovering funds from locked accounts. Numerous stories of people operating online etsy (and similar) storefronts getting accounts locked for vague claims they were actively money laundering, with no means for appeal.
Anyone just now becoming aware of the paypal execs’ corruption hasn’t been paying attention.
In a short 10-15 years we will see a resolution to this case and be able to have closure. A blink of a eye.
