Google Will Pay You To Track Your Browsing with Screenwise

If you weren’t a fan of Google’s privacy policy modifications, you might also be interested to hear about Screenwise. If you sign up for Screenwise, Google will track your browsing data non-anonymously. Why would you ever want let it do that? Cash money. Well, Amazon gift cards, which are basically cash money. If you sign up for Screenwise and install a Chrome browser extension designed for tracking, Google will give you a $5 Amazon gift card for joining up, with an additional $5 every three months you stick with it.

Now Google’s got a lot of your data already, why do they need this too? Well the thing worth noting here is that it is non-anonymous. The data Google collects while you do your web-business is stored somewhere, but it isn’t attached to you as a person; it’s numbered, not named. If you sign up for Screenwise, you’ll be giving them information directly associated with you, which is why the feel the need to offer you some cyberbux in exchange.

A few other things worth noting. First off, Amazon isn’t involved in this at all, they just happen to be a useful form of online currency at this point. Second, Google is working with Knowledge Networks on this, the latter group being the one that it appears will do the data collection and whatnot. When you give your email to Google, they’ll pass it on to Knowledge Networks and delete their copy, presumably meaning there’s no way that signing up with this will attach any of your anonymous data of previous use to your new non-anonymous profile. It also means that Knowledge Networks Terms and Conditions will be important to read if you opt-in. Lastly, while Google will pay you $5 to start and $5 every three months thereafter, the rewards top out at $25, for now. They’re considering what they’d want to do to thank users who felt like hanging on longer.

There hasn’t been any official announcement from Google yet, but the sign-up page exists if this sounds great to you and you want to get involved. If you don’t have anything to hide, free money is always free money, and you don’t have anything to hide, do you? Besides your privacy as a matter of principle, but what’s that really worth anyways? About $25 dollars in Amazon bucks, if Google had to guess, apparently.

(via Geek.com)

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