After being revealed for its shady tactics late last year, Honey has updated its Chrome extension to no longer take credit for affiliate sales it didn’t earn, likely as Chrome policy now prevents such behavior.
Honey, owned by PayPal, is a very popular browser extension used to apply coupon codes to your purchases. The extension came under fire late last year when the extension’s shady behavior was spotlighted. While Honey has always run on affiliate revenue gathered when you use the service, many took issue with how Honey would replace affiliate codes from creators – the very nature of the last-click attribution model affiliate programs operate on. Bigger issues, though, were that Honey works with businesses to limit what coupons are shown, and also that Honey would capture credit for an affiliate sale even if it directly told the user that it didn’t have any coupons or “Gold” (cashback) to offer.
As was revealed in a video in December, Honey has been taking credit for those sales by sneaking its affiliate codes into your browser when you interact with the extension. When no coupons or “Honey Gold” are available, tapping the “Got it” button on the pop-up would apply Honey’s affiliate codes, in turn removing any others that were active.
That behavior appears to have been removed.
We tested the latest Honey version (17.0.4) which was released to the Chrome Web Store earlier this month on the same website and creator as featured in the MegaLag video. In our test, tapping “Got it” did not change the affiliate cookie as was shown in the video. It’s unclear when that behavior changed, but it aligns with the new policy update in the Chrome Web Store, where Google specifically requires that extensions can only insert affiliate codes when a “discount, cashback, or donation is provided.”
Honey also added a disclosure regarding its use of affiliate codes recently, similarly in line with Google’s policy update.
Honey will still take credit for an affiliate sale if you use it for coupon codes or “Gold,” but this update removes the sneaky tactics that were being used previously.
More on Honey:
- Honey finally discloses that it uses affiliate codes now that Google Chrome requires it
- Google Chrome policy update restricts shady affiliate extensions, like Honey
- Honey grows back to 18 million users after being exposed for directly misleading users
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