New York: In a surprising move, the American multinational technology company – Amazon is now offering customers $2 per month for letting the company monitor the traffic on their phones.
By doing so, Amazon wants to monitor all the ads people see and when and where they see themselves, including its own ads. The data it gathers will “help brands offer better products and make ads from Amazon more relevant,” according to the program’s website.
As reported by Insider on Monday, Amazon is now offering payment for ad verification to members of the Amazon Shopper Panel, an invite-only reward program available to US and UK Amazon customers.
As per an image shared on the Shopper Panel’s website, users can opt in to ad verification, which lets Amazon “confirm which ads from Amazon they saw on their device. This can include Amazon’s own advertising or ads from third-party businesses that advertise through Amazon ads.”
Those who opt in give the Amazon Shopper Panel App Store and Play Store apps permission to “collect and use information” about the websites and time of day where you view ads on your smartphone.
“Your participation will help brands offer better products and make ads from Amazon more relevant,” Amazon’s Shopper Panel page says.
Under the company’s new invite-only Ad Verification program, Amazon is tracking what ads participants saw, where they saw them, and the time of day they were viewed. This includes Amazon’s own ads and third-party ads on the platform.
Through the program, Amazon hopes to offer more personalized-ad experiences to customers that reflect what they have previously purchased, according to Amazon.
“Your participation will help brands offer better products and make ads from Amazon more relevant,” Amazon wrote in its Shopper Panel FAQ.
The $2 reward only applies to Amazon users invited to participate in the program, though customers who didn’t get invited can get added to a waitlist and potentially join later, an Amazon spokesperson told Insider. The spokesperson declined to tell Insider how the company decided who to invite.
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