Cash For Tweets and Facebook Posts? Aussie Startup Pays You to Astroturf

An anonymous reader writes "While the celebs are already charging big money for their Tweets, an Aussie startup is ranking everyday people and turning them into product salespeople. After a successful start Down Under they have now hit Silicon Valley, but will Americans embrace selling to their friends?" From the article: "In a nutshell, individuals sign up to the Social Loot website and are assigned companies to promote to their circle of online friends. They are then paid on a sliding scale based on the amount of traffic their posts generate, and the quality of referrals and number of resulting sales. This is tracked by a code embedded in the links promoted by Social Loot’s spruikers."

Comments

Re:This should be considered illegal

[TechCar]

This is also one of the reasons I would never trust Google or their services. They are basically build and run on money got from lies. Often the advertisers aren't even the real product makers. They are affiliates who get a commission from each sale and have no problem lying to you. And the more information you give Google the more you get targeted. That is pure evil.

I appreciate my privacy so I buy desktop software that doesn't snoop on everything I do and works on my local computer instead of website (SaaS). That's why I use Microsoft Office - a full office suite that respects your privacy - instead of Google's hosted services that snoop your data.