Signal boost: LJ is changing your outbound links

[baxil]

Livejournal is secretly, and deliberately, changing certain outbound links that you post.

If you have affiliate links set up at places like Amazon, Livejournal is stealing money from you.

Even if you don't, this is a serious privacy issue, and they are breaking your links. For example, www.crittersbythebay.com goes to the front page of eBay

Comments

[kistaro]

LiveJournal can ignore quiet outrage. LiveJournal can ignore noisy outrage. They can't ignore Amazon telling them to go blow a goat because they're in flagrant violation of the terms of the Associate Program.

I pointed this out to Amazon. Any volunteers to go for the other sites affected by affiliate fraud?

As I posted in Peggy's journal, it's very clearly laid out what they can't do but are. So from what I sent to Amazon:

This script is undisclosed, LiveJournal does not declare their association with outboundlink.net or their affiliate program, Support questions about the matter have gone unanswered, LiveJournal is directly (and poorly) tampering with affiliate links by other users, and the page is processed through a redirect. Collectively, this violates sections 5, 9, 15, possibly 19 (the automatic system cannot control what links are rewritten and is poor at detecting correct links), 20, arguably but probably not 21, 23 (all links are processed as pop-ups), 25, 26, and arguably 27.
If you'd like to get your own opinion on

[goldkin]

I'm not sure I entirely agree with regards to noisy outrage, especially with a change that affects all users. I need only cite Facebook's inclusion of Beacon for a case where the public backlash and privacy implications killed this behavior dead.

That being said, I fully support informing all affiliates of this behavior, and assume this has already happened for most on the list. The backlash from sponsors and flagrant link abuse bordering on clickfraud should be enough to reverse this decision.

(Note that I assume you (Kistaro) already know what I linked. I added those for the benefit of other readers. :) )

[goldkin]

I'll admit that analogy isn't the best way to make this argument. That said, I can't see the change helping them in any public way, and ultimately see the bad PR costing them more than the affiliate information and money they're hoping to collect.

But then, I have a bad habit of thinking companies act rationally. So, you're probably correct.

[jenett]

I've got an invite code - will bounce it to you in a moment.

(I've got 4 others currently, too, so if anyone else wants one, let me know how to get it to you.)

I'm very very happy with Dreamwidth, incidentally.

[kshandra]

I already sent him one....

[baxil]

Choosing at random from the invite codes I was sent, I'll use this one. Thank you!

[kshandra]

Any volunteers to provide me with an invite code?

Done.

[baxil]

I chose at random from the codes I was sent and will use jenett's, so thank you and feel free to reuse this!

[dancinglights]

Looks like the invite code bit is taken care of. I have one spare if you know anyone else who needs/wants.

I do my SRS posting there and link to it from lj, which has inertia as usually-brainless social networking. Same bat channel.

[dancinglights]

From further down the rabbit hole in links from this post: supposed sneaky admin console 'stop that' value: http://caffeinepuppy.livejournal.com/214632.html

[baxil]

Thank you. The only reason I didn't specify the fix in my original post is that patching this on a person-by-person basis does not solve the problem. (And if I were to fix it, AFAIK it doesn't fix the problem on my journal, only on what I read.)

So either LJ fixes this globally, or I'm done.

[dancinglights]

Yeah, it's definitely not a fix. But it's something I'm going to do anyway and encourage other folks to while this is going down.