Understanding a user’s shopping habits and general interests is among some of the most profitable analytics any retail company could gain from its potential customers. This is why many of the major retail giants (like Amazon) have been scrambling to find ways to embed themselves in our daily lives. From the digital assistants that we use around the house to the devices that we carry with us in our pockets.
Many of these companie shave been secretly mining this data behind the scene using apps or devices for years. However, this is starting to get harder for them thanks to to various new laws and regulations that help protect everyone’s privacy. Preventing companies from mining this data without the knowledge of the user.
Now that the intentions of these companies are out there, Amazon is looking to skip beating around the bush and is coming right out with what it wants from users. The company wants to track everything you do on your mobile devices by analyzing all of your data. In order to entice users into allowing them, they are offering to pay for (although, not much).
Amazon is offering select users the chance to earn $2/month in exchange for allowing it access to this traffic data. It is a part of its Amazon Shopper Panel, which is an invite-only program. So you can’t exactly just sign up for it at will. Amazon is able to track where and when users see its ads as well as certain other ad occurrences. Users also have the chance to earn additional monthly funds by submitting receipts from the stores they shop at.
So if you don’t want to give your information away for free, you can always sell out by allowing them to pay you for it. For some, this will absolutely still raise concern over the privacy of users while others might not blink at the opportunity to earn a few dollars a month.
Obviously, a few dollars isn’t much and who know how much time on your end goes into it. This would heavily determine how worthwhile this really is to the user.
How valuable is your personal information and time? Would you be willing to expose your data to a company for just $2/month? Does this raise any personal concerns? Or are you completely for it? Feel free to share your own thoughts below in the comment section.
