SurveyRewards.me: Get Paid Pennies for Your Privacy

Market research companies often pay consumers small amounts to take surveys and provide their opinions about different products. But some sites that reward you for taking these surveys are better than others. SurveyRewards.me is one of the worst that we’ve reviewed to date.

What is SurveyRewards.me?

SurveyRewards promises to pay you points to take surveys. The accumulated points can be redeemed for gift cards.

How it works

You sign up by providing an email address, date of birth, your gender and zip code. That supposedly gives you access to paid surveys.

However, to take a survey, you’ll need to provide more information. And that can include information about your device, interests, lifestyle, demographics and “sensitive information,” which may include your sexual preferences, politics and income.

SurveyRewards.me review

If you’re signing up here hoping to make decent money, you’re likely to be disappointed.

When we reviewed the site, surveys paid between 15 cents and 47 cents each. However, the surveys paying more — i.e. 50 cents — required that you provide access to the cookies on your computer, device identification, information on your interests, demographics and “sensitive data.” And they also required 10 to 15 minutes of your time.

Other market research firms often assure users that this data will only be used by the site’s clients. It won’t be spread around widely. SurveyRewards gives no such assurances.

Risks

Indeed, the site says it can share your data with its partners, which may be in the U.S. or may be anywhere in the world. And the companies that SurveyRewards shares your data with may or may not be subject to the same rules and regulations of your home country.

Once you’ve agreed to their terms, there’s really no way to limit what’s done with your data. However, agreeing to release your data is required to even try to take a paid survey. In other words, when you give this permission, you don’t know whether you’ll actually qualify to get paid. So you are giving away with no real assurance that you’ll be compensated in some way.

In addition, SurveyRewards says that it is not paying you. Other companies that it partners with are paying you. And those other companies may have additional terms and uses for your data. Your use of the sites paying for your data is “at your own risk,” according to SurveyRewards.me.

Pay

If SurveyRewards was paying wildly generous amounts for taking its surveys, you might consider it anyway. But, in fact, the surveys pay poorly.

When we reviewed the site, the survey options included a 10-minute survey that paid 47 cents and a 15-minute survey paying 57 cents. That works out to about $2 an hour.

Notably, too, any rewards you earn are generally considered “pending” for two months after you’ve earned the rewards. SurveyRewards.me reserves the right to deduct or cancel your pending rewards at any time at the site’s sole discretion.

Recommendations

Survey sites are not big money makers in even the best of circumstances. But in SurveyRewards’ case, you give up a tremendous amount of privacy for token payments — if you get paid at all. We don’t think that’s a reasonable trade off. If you want to do it anyway, you can sign up with SurveyRewards.me here.

However, SideHusl.com does recommend survey and focus group sites that pay more for more detailed information. These sites also largely guard your data, sharing it only with their clients rather than with a wide group of affiliated companies. These recommended sites include Prolific, Respondent, UserInterviews, Maven, Rare Patient Voice, WinnWinn Research and Curion Insights.

What their users say (from Trust Pilot):

Don’t waste your time here. I have spent over an hour trying to take any surveys and am always disqualified, or “something” goes wrong. I will never go back.

The site is completely broken; the surveys that you don’t qualify for don’t get deleted and new surveys don’t get added. Do not use.