this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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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.
Your analogy doesn’t work at all.
If one of the core harms is the removal of income and tracking, ad blockers fall into this category. Ad blockers very explicitly remove these things. The harm is not “Honey stole my income” it’s “Honey removed my tracking and Honey added their tracking.” Read the Legal Eagle case.
The key point they were making is that uBO isn't adding their own affiliate links and stealing revenue they haven't earned, unlike Paypal.
I wonder if those other “spammy” adblockers do precisely this. Insert affiliate links.
Doesn’t Brave already swap some ads for their own?
I have read the case.
I don't enrich myself by using an adblocker. And I certainly don't enrich myself at other's expense.
It could never apply to ad blockers. You install an ad blocker knowing that it will block stuff... and explicitly WANTING it to do so.
Nobody installed honey knowing that it was manipulating cookies and stuff. The normal layperson who installs it will just think "It's just chucking in coupon codes into that box!"...
One is predicated on a lie of omission... the other is literally what the user wants. There's a huge difference...
You’re looking at it from an end user perspective. “I want it to do this, so it’s ok” for an ad blocker, but “I didn’t know it was doing this so it’s bad” for Honey.
But the LE/GN cases are that Honey changed URLs and cost them the sale revenue, no? That’s not the end user experience. Seems like that could easily be pivoted to a website who claims lost revenue was stolen from them because ad blockers are manipulating their site/URLs, end users’ desires be damned.
https://www.cpmlegal.com/assets/htmldocuments/GamersNexus%20v.%20Paypal.pdf
So yes, they're suing on behalf of creators.
But they're using logic of what is promised/advertised to users... alongside the creator side of it all.
Which we know is inaccurate at this point and honey is lying. Most of the rest will come out in discovery if Honey wants to fight it. And I think it's safe to say that anything that comes out in discovery will simply hang honey even more than we already know.
Gotcha. Thanks for providing the additional detail! It is comforting to learn why it’s unlikely this could affect ad block.
I mean it certainly could if it was deemed so broad as "Honey was manipulating affiliate links", but I don't think it would.
Because the courts in America have proven how much they care about rule of law and procedure when it comes to rich offenders lately..
I understand why you would think that, but this is not the case. Not a lawyer though, not legal advice.
There are 2 main types of causes of action for this, let's go over them:
But adblockers don't enable unlawful enrichment. Or do they?
Only paid ones. Theoretically could impact Brave, for instance.
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.
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
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.