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.

[aprivatefox]

LJ is acting rationally - from the perspective of the largest social networking site in Russia, which incidentally has a large cost-center of an English-speaking site along for the ride, that costs them a lot and delivers little.

They don't have a business reason to care about their English-speaking users' happiness in any meaningful way, and that makes the situation bad.

[goldkin]

Perhaps this is a naive question, but assuming this is a global change, wouldn't Russian journals also be affected?

[aprivatefox]

Possibly, but I'm mostly seeing US e-commerce sites on that list. I don't know to what extent e-commerce and affiliate programs are a Big Deal in the Russian markets, honestly, but I think this move is far more likely to blow up on the US market than the Russian.

[baxil]

I don't know, from reading the wikipedia age on the Beacon kerfluffle, it seems like FB was acting with LJ-like levels of cluelessness.

But, yes, this is just one more in a string of decisions that makes it increasingly obvious LJ does not care to treat their users like actual customers. Strikethrough was bad enough -- but affiliate theft and link breaking is a whole extra level of scummy above and beyond content disputes and advertising issues.

[kistaro]

I think the difference is that while Facebook has been holding steady, LiveJournal has been getting steadily worse over time since the 6A deal happened.

[baxil]

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

I do not have any affiliate memberships affected by this, but I wholeheartedly endorse this course of action.

[goldkin]

By the way, has anyone sent this to Slashdot?

[baxil]

Excellent idea! I'll send in a submission now, but multiple notices probably won't hurt.

[baxil]

http://slashdot.org/submission/1186268/Livejournal-Secretly-Stealing-Affiliate-Links :

"Detective work by Livejournal users has turned up a Javascript file that stealthily changes users' outgoing links to e-commerce sites upon clicking, including substitution of affiliate IDs with a different ID number. There's no mention of this in the TOS or in recent code updates. More damningly, there's a secret setting in the LJ console that turns this behavior off. With over a million active users, that's a lot of affiliate theft."