Telling on Yourself

With so many people out to buy your privacy online, it’s hard to tell whom one should sell out to.

Orange-based LanguageForce Inc. last week made the quixotic jump from publishing translation software to paying people to surf the Web. For 40 cents an hour, up to $16 a month, LanguageForce gets to collect and market your Web surfing habits to companies who will advertise to you as you surf.

But isn’t your privacy worth more than $16 a month? Apparently the 50,000 people who signed up for LanguageForce’s GoToWorld.com service last week don’t think so.

AllAdvantage.com, the leader in this field, and GetPaid2Surf.Net both offer 50 cents an hour, up to $20 a month. UtopiAd.com pays its members a percentage of the money that advertisers pay the company. UtopiAd doesn’t list a maximum payout. All of these companies also pay customers more when they sign up their friends.

Free-PC Inc. offers both free Internet access and a new computer for access to a person’s privacy. The Pasadena firm, which just recently began shipping the first of 10,000 free personal computers, gets to monitor the person’s computer usage and sell that data. The computers being distributed generally retail for about $700 and Internet access generally goes for about $18 a month.

Cybergold pays “customers” whenever they fill out a registration form or sign up for a free trial with one of their advertisers. Payments vary from 25 cents to $20 for applying for a credit card, and some advertisers make higher cash-back offers for actual purchases. The information you provide goes only to the advertiser and is not resold by Cybergold.

Some clever hackers have begun to take advantage of the marketers, creating programs that automatically surf the Web for them, assuring them of a paycheck and dirtying the data that the marketers collect.

Jonathan Gaw covers technology and electronic commerce for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7818 and at jonathan.gaw@latimes.com.