[delusional]

Likening any of this to Volkswagen emissions compliance scandal does a huge disservice by treating "Affiliate Marketing" as far too important.

"Who gets a kickback on this toothbrush" is a much MUCH less important question than "do you pollute the air we are all breathing".

[choult]

It's comparing Honey's behavior to a well-known and comprehended scandal. Simile is a tried and tested way (hah!) to explain otherwise potentially hard to understand or dry content.

It's not about the severity of the impact, its the fact that they were breaking the rules and explicitly coding to actively avoid being caught by testers.

[bedelman]

choult: The factors you mention are the factors that led me to propose the "Honey's Dieselgate" title and to compare Honey to VW.

Of course I agree that health is more important than affiliate commissions. So the comparison only goes so far.

[choult]

Thanks for your contribution to this Ben - I was quite stunned by Megalag's finding, and I agree with you that it could definitely be characterized as wire fraud.

I think the very interesting wrinkle here is that, for the most part, their victims are corporations - meaning, sadly, that it's much more likely they will be prosecuted, either in civil or criminal court.

[collingreen]

Probably better to compare to ubers grayball although that may be less well known.

[Dylan16807]

Refusing service (and showing a fake status screen) is in the same ballpark, but dieselgate is a much closer match. They couldn't avoid being put under test, so they had separate behavior based on whether heuristics said it was in a testing environment.

[salawat]

These are the same types who have poisoned the well of information that was the Internet you can actually find things on for the sake of the ad driven model. Far as I'm concerned, the moral injuries are the same even if the physical details are different.