What is Honey-the plug in, Let's talk about the safety!

There are dozens of plugins like Honey that claim to save you money. But what might a simple plugin actually cost you?

What does a free coupon really cost? Is Honey safe for your privacy?

Internet commerce practically runs on coupons, coupon plugins, vouchers, and promotional codes. Several dedicated sites, platforms, and tools like Honey and InvisibleHand help you save at checkout.

Savvy online shoppers don’t even search for coupons anymore but use a coupon plugin loaded into their browser, which automatically scans the webpage, hunts down, and, if you’re lucky, applies the best coupon code at checkout. Going one step further is offering cashback to shoppers at certain retailers via rewards programs.

It’s basically free money. Or is it?

The plugins are quick to add, easy to sign up for, and there are numerous options — Honey, InvisibleHand, PriceScout, Wikibuy, and CouponFollow, to name a few. Best of all, they’re free. As Honey gleefully declares on its website, “It’s basically free money.”

What is Honey, and why do people use it? Honey is the most popular coupon Chrome plugin. Once added to your browser, it will automatically look for coupons as you browse any shopping website. Additionally, the tool will automatically apply the coupon during checkout. This makes saving money simpler than ever. The company claims its plugin works with over 30,000 online stores.

Additionally, you can add items to a “Droplist.” This tool will alert you whenever an item’s a discount shows up. The service is free to use, but it has its downsides, especially if you care about privacy.

Plugins collect your data

Once installed, these coupon plugins need to monitor every site you visit, just in case they have a coupon handy. That opens up your data — a stack of it —

There’s not necessarily a need to automatically assume every one of these plugins and coupon Chrome extensions is preparing to sell your data to the highest bidder. That said, the privacy policies are varied and are not reviewed by the vast majority of these companies.

Basically, coupon Chrome extension companies may not be storing your credit card number or email address. Still, they’ve got plenty of general information that makes you at least identifiable as part of a target audience. They can sell information like that for big bucks.

That question of “is Honey safe” may very well depend on where you want your information to be, no matter how anonymous.

Are they all just selling my data?

Both Honey and InvisibleHand clarify they actually may share your data with third-party websites “in such a way that no personally identifying information is disclosed or can be deciphered.”

While selling your data isn’t the sole game, accruing it to understand what works and what doesn’t makes these companies powerful.

Most of them may promise never to sell your data to third parties. They also reserve the right to forego this promise in certain situations.

Honey can disclose “personally identifiable” information to “a buyer, affiliate or another successor if Honey is involved in a merger, acquisition, divestiture, restructuring, dissolution or sale of all or a portion of its assets and User-Provided Information and Automatically Collected Information is among the assets being transferred.” And that’s what happened. PayPal bought Honey for $4B. Why? To get data!

It’s the eternal struggle of the internet age: how much value do you place on privacy?