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http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100304/1741458425.shtml
LiveJournal Accused Of Redirecting Links, Swiping Affiliate Fees
from the trust-issues dept
You may or may not remember, many years ago, that one of the "tricks" used by adware was to hijack affiliate fees. Basically, the way it would work is that the adware would watch where you were clicking, and if the URL was for an online store that had an affiliate program or affiliate link, the adware would swap in its own adware account info, allowing the adware company to collect the affiliate fees rather than the company/individual who actually earned it. Sneaky.
However, now there are some claims that popular blog/community site LiveJournal is doing the same thing itself. Shawn Tutt points us to a story claiming that LiveJournal is redirecting outbound links from users such that they appear to strip any affiliate codes and add LiveJournal's own affiliate codes to a long list of popular e-commerce sites. It's hard to think of a better way to piss off a bunch of your own users than to replace their own affiliate codes with your own. Once people started complaining about this, it looks like LiveJournal stripped out the code. Still, it does raise some really big trust questions about LiveJournal, if it thought this was a good idea in the first place.
LiveJournal Accused Of Redirecting Links, Swiping Affiliate Fees
from the trust-issues dept
You may or may not remember, many years ago, that one of the "tricks" used by adware was to hijack affiliate fees. Basically, the way it would work is that the adware would watch where you were clicking, and if the URL was for an online store that had an affiliate program or affiliate link, the adware would swap in its own adware account info, allowing the adware company to collect the affiliate fees rather than the company/individual who actually earned it. Sneaky.
However, now there are some claims that popular blog/community site LiveJournal is doing the same thing itself. Shawn Tutt points us to a story claiming that LiveJournal is redirecting outbound links from users such that they appear to strip any affiliate codes and add LiveJournal's own affiliate codes to a long list of popular e-commerce sites. It's hard to think of a better way to piss off a bunch of your own users than to replace their own affiliate codes with your own. Once people started complaining about this, it looks like LiveJournal stripped out the code. Still, it does raise some really big trust questions about LiveJournal, if it thought this was a good idea in the first place.
