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Amazon takes a swipe at Honey, PayPal’s $4B acquisition
- deegles 7y agoDoes Honey sell services to hedge funds?
- brenden2 7y agoMost likely. Many, many businesses sell their data to hedge funds through shell companies or 3rd parties that make it extremely difficult to figure out where your data goes.
- treebornfrog 7y agoAny proof?
- readarticle 7y agoThere’s plenty, to the point asking this question is somewhat indicative you don’t really care. Here’s an example from The NY Times a few weeks ago that topped HN. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat... Data -> shell -> fund pipeline has been a thing for a decade now at the very least.
- brenden2 7y agoI worked at a major quant hedge fund for a while, and my duties involved working with these data sets.
- anilshanbhag 7y agoWhen Honey was acquired, I wondered why it was valued at $4B when all it does is apply coupon codes. Now it is clear - it's the data. Look at https://www.joinhoney.com/ https://www.joinhoney.com/ - they make no effort to tell you that they track / store all your order data across websites !
- giancarlostoro 7y agoSo they likely have access to info PayPal doesnt. So how much does PayPal make from selling financial data then?
- Deinos 7y agoIt is always the data. Everyone stores everything these days, even if it is not immediately acted upon/sold. If it is not immediately used, it is still a bargaining chip for valuations/acquisitions.
- reciprocindy 7y agoYep data is more valuable than oil.
- nbs_tar 7y agoI think the Stratechery article on the acquisition is paywalled, but I liked his explanation that while paypal positions this as a consumer play, its about the demand gen value they could create for paypal merchants. Amazon's opposition seems to align with this thesis.
- a012 7y agoYeah, users get their discount codes and Honey gets money from the shops who gave discount code away, then got $4B acquisition. Sounds not right, too sweet to be real.
- DubiousPusher 7y agoNo kidding. Obviously Amazon has some impure motives here but the credulous way this article treats Honey's claims should be journalistic malpractice.
- chatmasta 7y agoThe first time I encountered this was when one of our devs was having trouble with CSP violations in development. Turns out the honey chrome extension injecting scripts was the problem!
- 7y ago
- bordercases 7y agoAre there open source equivalents to Honey using APIs from existing websites for more common vendors?
- on_and_off 7y agothat would be great ! I can't remember its name but I have been tempted to install a similar price tracking extension .. except that it can siphon all my browsing data. hard pass. An open source app would provide _some_ safety around such a permission
- thinkling 7y agoI'd love to see an "app store" of fully (non-obfuscated) open source & vetted browser extensions.
- zelly 7y agoWhen they ask me how I knew it was a market top, I will tell them a Chrome extension sold for $4 billion.
- bitxbit 7y agoI’ve been saying that since two years ago. This bull market has been one of the greatest artificial run in history. OR it could be that we’ve been conditioned to think this way based on the dotcom lores and permanent risk-aversion stemming from the financial crisis. I personally believe the incredible rise in standard of living across the globe is something people in the investment community do not talk about enough. And that is how I come to terms with the past decade.
- ellius 7y agoOr QE was essentially money printing that rippled through the shadow banking system in such a way that the price of certain assets (companies/stocks, real estate) are inflating indefinitely.
- treebornfrog 7y agoThis times a thousand. Im constantly torn between 'new highs for years' vs 'but we had 2 bubbles see how those went?'
- mwerty 7y agoIn the same boat. Each dollar I move from equity to cash I feel a little safer and a little more foolish.
- dangus 7y agoHoney's revenue is $100 million and growing by 100% a year. How is $4 billion overvalued for them? They have 17 million users and they aggregate shopping data of everything those users purchase online from any shopping website. There are certainly other economic indicators of a bubble but this is not one of them. A giant payment processing company like PayPal has a lot of reasons to "overpay" for a company like Honey, including the fact that they could have Honey prioritize retailers that use PayPal.
- dangus 7y ago> “Honey tracks your private shopping behavior, collects data like your order history and items saved, and can read or change any of your data on any website you visit,” Amazon does all three of these things, especially when you check out the Chrome Web Store page for the "Amazon Assistant for Chrome." In fact that particular web extension requires more permissions than Honey: Display Notifications, Read and change your bookmarks, Detect your physical location, and Manage your apps, extensions and themes (I wonder if it uninstalls Honey!). Honey's Privacy Policy doesn't say they can track data from any website you visit: > Honey does not track your search engine history, emails, or your browsing on any site that is not a retail website (a site where you can shop and make a purchase). When you are on a pre-approved retail site, to help you save money, Honey will collect information about that site that lets us know which coupons and promos to find for you. We may also collect information about pricing and availability of items, which we can share with the rest of the Honey community. > What data we do not collect > We collect information that we believe can help us save our users time and money. This does not include, and we do not collect, any information from your search engine history, emails, or from websites that are not retail sites. Now, I'd never join Honey as it is a service that's too invasive for my own standards. However, Amazon is also blatantly lying about Honey - Honey only seems to read website data from whitelisted shopping sites.
- tempsy 7y agoThe beauty of the CCPA is that you can request data for yourself and confirm what Honey actually collects and compare with what they state they collect. No need to speculate who is right at this point based on privacy policy statements that may or may not be outdated or not totally comprehensive.
- jagged-chisel 7y agoDo we not expect a disconnect between stated collection and what's dumped? Why wouldn't they collect everything, state minimal, and dump (on request) the minimal they state?
- tempsy 7y ago
- yalogin 7y agoPayPal acquirer honey for the data of course but I still believe it will be a write off in a couple years. Those kind of browser extensions are really low user retention a doing term something will come along and people just move on to it. Their users all are price sensitive deal hunters and the moment something comes up they will move.
- donmcronald 7y agoIt’s crazy. - They’re beholden to the extension stores for distribution. - They probably hijack affiliate links which I personally think is a type of fraud. Regardless of the ethics, it’s detrimental to retailers that allow it because the real people driving traffic will give up. - They collect data that would otherwise be exclusive to the retailer. Why buy data from Amazon if Honey will sell you the same thing plus a bunch of other related data? There is ZERO upside for successful retailers like Amazon and a bunch of downside.
- takeda 7y agoSlightly unrelated, but they also faked reviews on chrome. Just compare reviews on Chrome vs reviews on Firefox.