Invisibly

Invisibly Review:

Invisibly wants to pay you for sharing your personal information with marketers. However, there’s very little money to be made here, at least at the moment.

Invisibly estimates that sharing all of your Internet browsing history, including your online purchases, will generate a payment equivalent to about $2 a month. Giving access to your Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest accounts could generate about 25 cents per platform, per month. Providing information on your banking and credit card accounts is expected to generate 75 cents monthly. If you connect all of those accounts, and fill out a 48-question profile, you may earn as much as $5 monthly. By the way, those payments are estimates, not guarantees.

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That said, you get paid nothing from companies like Facebook and Google, who regularly track your every online move. So even though Invisibly’s payment scheme is pretty puny, it’s quite literally better than nothing.

However, if privacy is a concern, you should think twice before signing up with this platform. Even though others are tracking you, this site only gets into your business if you invite them. For $2 to $5 per month, I’m not sure that’s a worthwhile cost-benefit trade-off.

What we like

Each user can see what data Invisibly has gathered about them by viewing their “data vault.” You also have the right to erase or correct your data. In a world where most companies track you without a lot of disclosure, Invisibly’s transparency is refreshing.

What we don’t like

A number of countries and individual states have passed privacy protections because the technology on your phones and computers allow a nearly endless number of companies to track your every move. Collected data ranges from geolocation tracking — where you are and where you’ve been– to what you buy, what social media accounts you use and what you say. Invisibly is essentially asking you to give up some of those privacy protections in exchange for a small monthly fee.

The site says your information will be “anonymized,” so no one will be given you name or address. However, with enough data points, you lose any real anonymity.

The site pays its partners via PayPal after they’ve accumulated $5 in Invisibly points, which are worth about a penny a piece. However, if your account is inactive for 180 days, or if you violate the site’s terms and get kicked off the platform, the site can close your account and take your points away. You also lose your points, if you voluntarily pull your data and close your account.

Recommendations

If you do decide to sign up with Invisibly, we’d highly recommend that you do not provide your banking information. Connecting to your bank does not give them access to your account. But it gives them access to a huge amount of information about the companies you bank with and how you spend. This could make you far more susceptible to financial frauds, such as “spear phishing.” With spear phishing, criminals use bits of true data to trick you into divulging more important data, such as your account passwords, credit card, or Social Security numbers.

Better ways to make easy money include ProductTube and Prolific. Both of these companies ask for your opinions and pay for you to share them.