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Honest question: what does it really take to get an affiliate account shut down? If I understood how this works, it simply replaces the URL of the affiliate li
by groaner 17y ago
Honest question: what does it really take to get an affiliate account shut down?
If I understood how this works, it simply replaces the URL of the affiliate link on the page I'm viewing. If that's all it takes to redirect the affiliate payment, what's there to prevent a rogue Firefox extension that secretly replaces every amazon.com link with one that deposits into the author's account? How about a proxy server that scans for these URLs and rewrites them so they make the server's operator rich?
While it's good to see this being used for a good cause, it feels as if exactly the same method can be serving more nefarious purposes. Perhaps this will require oversight from the whoever runs the affiliate program, and I'm having a hard time imagining how they'd be happy if a third party is taking a cut of these fees.
- illumin8 17y agoI believe the issue is that Amazon and others specifically forbid affiliates from overwriting or replacing other affiliates links with their own. But yes, you are correct, some of the more "successful" (if you can call it that) Windows malware has taken the form of IE6 browser plugins and toolbars that overwrite affiliate links in any page you browse to. I can seriously imagine some enterprising 16 year old somewhere in Eastern Europe making 5-6 figure monthly income from this back in the early 2000s.
- natrius 17y agoEasy fix: Audit a random selection of affiliate referrers by checking for the affiliate code in the actual source of the page. If it isn't there, either disable that affiliate account or check more of that account's referrers, denying credit for any pages that don't contain the affiliate code.
- stealthyc2010 17y agoIf I understand this correctly, it doesn't overwrite existing affiliate links. I feel it should though, its my browser after all.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]