LiveJournal is cheating bloggers out of their privacy -- and their affiliate fees

[julesjones]

I first saw romance blogger Elisa Rolle talking about her affiliate links being re-written to Livejournal's benefit a couple of weeks ago, but I'd just got off a very long haul flight and was too jet-lagged to post about it coherently at the time. Now other people have noticed LiveJournal hijacking affiliate links. And not just actual affiliate links, but anything that looked a bit like one of the big commercial sites with affiliate schemes.

Once a lot of people started shouting about this, LJ did its usual "oops, we never meant you to notice th... er, never meant the code to do that." My reaction is, pull the other one, it hath bells on. However, while they appear to have backtracked on this at least in part, at least until next time, Livejournal are flannelling on refunding the affiliate fees they hijacked from Elisa, plus insulting her as well for being pissed off at being fobbed off and lied to over the last couple of weeks. I'd suggest reading Elisa's latest post on the subject, for a nice detailed timeline of how they have repeatedly lied about this over the course of some weeks.

I'm less than pleased about this, both on my own behalf and for my friends. Please don't tell me that affiliate links are banned by LJ terms of service -- what the ToS ban are banner ads, and you'd have to be intent on finding some justification for this fraud to claim that affiliate text links fall under that heading. And this isn't just stripping such links, this is actively re-writing links in a deceptive manner, so that when you hover over the links you see what the blogger intended you to be passed to, and only when you click the link is it re-written on the fly to send you somewhere else without your knowledge. In other words, the sort of tactic used by phishers and other people who do not have your best interests at heart.

Think about that. LJ thinks it's fine for them to silently re-direct you anywhere they choose, and to use third-party technology to do so without bothering to test exactly what it's doing. I can think of some really *interesting* things to do with that. The sort of things that are illegal under The Computer Misuse Act 1990.

And on a less legalistic level -- I pay for my account. I pay for it so that my LJ is an ad-free zone. I mainly use the affiliate links as a way of tracking which of my "shiny thing you can buy" posts people are finding most useful, and I do not appreciate having that functionality taken away from me so they can make more money off my paid-for account. I also do not appreciate having links randomly hijacked to be turned into ads simply because they pattern match some unrelated commerce website's url.

In case it is "accidentally" re-enabled, a description of the opt-out here:
http://caffeinepuppy.livejournal.com/214632.html

Comments

[zeborah]

I do believe them that the rewriting was incompetence rather than anything else - other things like redirecting glutenfreebay.com to ebay.com are so stupid that "idiotic buggy code that no-one bothered to understand or test before plugging in to LJ" is the only thing that makes sense.

*However* I also believe that even what they intended to do -- add their own affiliate link onto links that didn't already have them, without telling us that's what they were doing -- is also a sufficient breach of my trust that if it wouldn't inconvenience a bunch of my friends I'd remove all my content from LJ entirely. Because rewriting my words to attribute to me things I didn't say -- making it look like I'm making money off something when I'm not -- is just not on as far as I'm concerned.

(Also there's still tracking going on, therefore possible privacy concerns; personally I don't care about tracking but I know others do.)

[julesjones]

I'm willing to believe that the sheer extent of it was incompetence, but what they're semi-admitting to is more than bad enough, for the reasons you give, plus the security implications I alluded to above. Even silently re-writing links I didn't have my own affiliate code on is a major no-no for me, given that I have been exceedingly clear about Amazon links are going bye-bye unless I have explicit reason to include them. And if I have reason to include them, if I choose not to have affiliate linking on them, that is a deliberate choice on my part and I wish them to stay that way.

[zeborah]

Oh yes, absolutely. "We didn't mean to [do super-incredibly evil thing]! We were just too stupid and incompetent in our implementation of [unusually brazen evil thing]!" is to me a credible but not very exculpatory argument.

[mishalak]

At first it was not clear and I had thought, "Oh, they're breaking links now?" without much rancor. When I learned that Livejournal was actually getting the affiliate fees themselves it I finally understood why people were upset. It's one thing to have code that prevents LJ from becoming another Myspace full of accounts just trying to make a buck through affiliate fees and quite another to glom onto the money yourself.

[julesjones]

If they'd been simply breaking links, and told us in advance that they were going to do it because they were starting to see problems with spambot accounts, I wouldn't be making serious plans to gradually move my blog over to DW (rather than using it as an emergency back-up, as I currently do). It's the fraud, and the deliberate deception when asked about it, that has finally tipped the balance for me.