Amazon is now offering selected customers the opportunity to receive two dollars per month for monitoring their mobile traffic. The goal, according to Amazon, is to improve the playout of ads on the platform.
Advertisements are the goal
In a statement, the company says the goal of the tracking is to improve the playout of ads on the platform. For this purpose, it is to be tracked when users see which advertisements. The advertisements played are also to be linked to the surfing and purchasing behavior of the participants. This should ultimately make it possible to gain insights into the current matching of ads and interests, on the basis of which matching is to be improved in the future.
The option is currently only open to invited customers of the company. In addition, only people living in the USA and the UK can be invited. Those who live in Germany and would like to make their data available for money have so far been left out in the cold.
Not a new idea
The idea of paying money for data is by no means new. Facebook and Google have operated similar programs in the past, which were also intended to provide broad insights into the behavior of users. The most far-reaching of these was a Google program in which a kind of surveillance router was installed in participants’ homes. This made it possible to track all Internet traffic. All such programs were discontinued due to data protection concerns. Amazon’s program may be facing a similar end – although participation is voluntary, which should at least mitigate privacy concerns compared to conventional hidden tracking.
