851
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
851 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
60350 readers
6800 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's more than that, at least from a EU perspective. Don't know what is legal in the US, but manipulating URLs in an obviously malicious way and without the user's explicit knowledge and consent would be highly illegal here.
Are they modifying URLs?
As far as I know they steal cookies but don't change the URL.
Also, I think the bizarre market practice of "last click takes attribution" seems to be also common in EU.
Unfortunately just because it's shady doesn't make it immediately illegal even here in EU.
And the response from PayPal Honey shows they want to fight it in court. Which don't think they would do if they thought it would have been considered highly illegal.
They found a loophole and abused it to steal creators (and users).
That's not what his video showed though. They don't change the URL, they open another tab, which then overrides the cookie/session variable that is used to determine who the referrer is. It's still scummy, but it doesn't seem to be swapping links outright.