Alternative monetization of forum

eeeee

Forked from monetization of forum
As it happens, I was contacted out of the blue over email this week, by a company offering $200 a month per 1000 active users.
It requires forum (or any other code like a game etc) to be bundled into an app and their 'invisible' service is added in the background.

they said can pay more than adverts, and isnt noticed by users.
The documentation was a little vague on what their service does, but it said it 'uses clients spare internet data to help entities do web searches' etc!

My hunch is its some kind of proxy service! Or something like that.
Im not sure of the legalities of using clients data without getting their express approval, so I dont consider implementing this.
But it has alerted me to the possibility that apps might potentially do this ... Something to look out for !

josef

@eeeee It sounds very suspicious
But a proxy service in the browser probably isn't, because it will hardly be effective due to CORS enforcement

julian

@josef considering that @eeeee said "app" and "game", my assumption is that it'd be for native apps, and not browser-based apps.

There's a reason you can't use Threads on the web... you can't track people as effectively via web

NodeHam

@eeeee proxy?

It sounds like a company or maybe it's a trend that's not so public, to gain access to users personal information and behaviors to add to larger sets of data pools.

I wonder how many people are being offered to do stuff like this and our information is being bought and sold even on sites we'd never expect. You should make them public and expose them where ever you can. That bottom feeding of our personal data.

julian

@NodeHam My assumption is more nefarious... I think it is to build out a botnet. At a single command all connected clients will spam a target