this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
363 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
60553 readers
3558 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
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 use uBlock Origin to remove tracking. I also manually remove tracking. Privacy Badger is a tool that works to explicitly do this kind of tidying.
I think we can agree that modifying a cookie such as that Honey does to steal commissions and blocking a cookie in its entirety as a security or privacy measure are material different actions.
So I find the concerns that Honey getting sued and having to pay damages could open up ad blockers to getting sued overblown.
You can quantify damages equal to the amount of commissions paid on purchases actually made in Honey’s case (and on the consumer side with the difference in discounts provided by Honey withholding the best coupons it claims to provide)
You can’t quantify damages made by blocking ads or tracking cookies as advertisement and tracking doesn’t directly translate to sales