Summary
- Honey is accused of failing to provide real savings and sniping revenue from creators.
- Google has updated its rules on Chrome extensions to address affiliate program abuse.
- Despite thcontroversy, Honey’s extension remains available on the Chrome Web Store.
Honey, a PayPal-owned browser extension ostensibly meant to help users find coupons when shopping online, has been at the center of an ongoing controversy for a couple of months now. In December, YouTuber MegaLag posted a video labeling the extension a scam that siphons money from creators and regularly fails to actually save users money. In January, lawyer Devin Stone of the Legal Eagle YouTube channel announced a lawsuit against Honey, alleging more or less the same as MegaLag. Now, Google’s updated its rules around Chrome extensions, seemingly in a bid to prevent similar behavior from other add-ons.
The issues raised about Honey come down to two key allegations. First, that the extension wasn’t actually getting the best deals for users, and regularly failed to find coupon codes that would be easily uncovered with a Google search — often swapping in its own coupons instead. Second, and most relevant to this story, that Honey snipes referral revenue from creators by swapping in its own affiliate information, even in cases when it was unable to find any coupon to apply to the transaction.
As spotted by The Verge, an update to Google’s policies about affiliate programs tied to browser extensions seems tailor-made to address the latter part of the Honey drama. The new policy reads, in part, that “Affiliate links, codes, or cookies must only be included when the extension provides a direct and transparent user benefit related to the extension’s core functionality” — a principle Honey doesn’t seem to have been abiding by.
Honey is still available
You can still grab the Honey extension from the Chrome Web Store. Google’s policy update seems directly related to the drama surrounding the extension; it’s unclear how exactly the change will affect Honey going forward. You can read Google’s updated Affiliate Ads policy for the Chrome Web Store here.
