I’ve discovered the WeWard app that pays you for your daily steps and I’m curious to know how it works
In: Economics
It’s basically the same scammy “fill out surveys to get gift cards” type thing. Like walking earns you points and theoretically walking 8 miles a day could earn you enough to get two dollars a week. But quickly it’s directing you to the “real” way you earn points. signing up for stuff and buying things and so on.
like Basically any of those gift card for survey things will give you some tiny insignificant amount of “free points” to get you in. This is that, but the free points are tied to walking instead. With high requirements and low caps so they know you aren’t really even going to earn the max and even if you did the max isn’t much
I don’t know about that specific app, but from others that I’ve seen it’s some sort of government health incentive combined with a little data harvesting.
It’s like the old adage: “If you’re not paying for the product, then *you* are the product being sold.”
That usually means one (or both) of two things: advertising or data.
For example, companies like Google or Facebook offer free online products so they can collect data on you, your searches, what you view or click on, etc. They then sell that data to other companies so those companies can create advertisements tailored to you to get you to buy *their* products.
I haven’t used WeWard and don’t know for sure, but it looks like WeWard is probably collecting data on you, your habits, the time you take your walk, where you walk, etc. and then selling that data to “partners” (aka advertisers) who provide “special offers” to WeWard users. From their website, it appears it also suggests routes for your walk that take you past “_your favorite monuments, **shops** and parks_.” Note how “shops” is buried in the middle of that statement. I’d bet that the retail outlets that are appearing on the WeWard map are paying WeWard for the privilege in hopes that it drives extra customer traffic to their shop while you’re out on your walk.
And a lot of these things aren’t just “hope” driven. Given that they are collecting your location data on your walk, they *know* what shops you’ve stopped in and visited on your walk. So their salespeople can go to those shops and say “Hey, you’re already getting x% increase in traffic from our walkers. Retailers who listed on our WeWard map get an x*+y*% increase in traffic just by spending $X month for showing up on our map.” So it’s less “Trust us, it will drive more customer traffic to your store,” and more “Here’s the data on the amount of monthly additional customers it can drive.”
This is the power of the companies having access to data about you — they can build entire business models and sales pitches around it.
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