> “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,”<p>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:<p>Display Notifications, Read and change your bookmarks, Detect your physical location, and Manage your apps, extensions and themes (I wonder if it uninstalls Honey!).<p>Honey's Privacy Policy doesn't say they can track data from <i>any</i> website you visit:<p>> 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.<p>> What data we do not collect<p>> 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.<p>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.
When 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.<p>Look at <a href="https://www.joinhoney.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joinhoney.com/</a> - they make no effort to tell you that they track / store all your order data across websites !
PayPal 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.