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.
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