Cash For Tweets and Facebook Posts? Aussie Startup Pays You to Astroturf 156
An anonymous reader writes "While the celebs are already charging big money for their Tweets, an Aussie startup is ranking everyday people and turning them into product salespeople. After a successful start Down Under they have now hit Silicon Valley, but will Americans embrace selling to their friends?"
From the article: "In a nutshell, individuals sign up to the Social Loot website and are assigned companies to promote to their circle of online friends. They are then paid on a sliding scale based on the amount of traffic their posts generate, and the quality of referrals and number of resulting sales. This is tracked by a code embedded in the links promoted by Social Loot’s spruikers."
Block It (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about Twitter at least, but on Facebook, all the posts came from the Social Loot application. It took all of 5 seconds to "block all posts from Social Loot" to my wall, and now I need never know of its existence (except for Slashdot - thanks guys).
Re:This should be considered illegal (Score:4, Informative)
This one relies on embedded codes in their URLs to measure their effectiveness ; it wouldn't be difficult to detect.
Re:This should be considered illegal (Score:4, Informative)
How do you know Microsoft Office respects your privacy, do you have access to the source?
You don't need it. It runs on your local machine, so you can check every network connection that it makes and, more importantly, you can trivially prevent it from making any network connections.
From what I've heard Microsoft at the very least keeps track of the hardware on which you run its software.
And the reason you know this (it's related to Windows Update, not MS Office specifically) is that people did intercept the data sent to Microsoft from Windows Update and found out exactly what was being sent.
This is obviously spam-for-hire (Score:5, Informative)
1. Block all email to/from socialloot.com. (This might need updating if they register additional domains to avoid blocking. A very common spammer tactic is to use sequentially numbered domains, e.g., example01.com, example02.com, example03.com.)
2. Firewall out 122.252.6.0/24. Make the block is bidirectional so that nobody on your network can reach their allocation. (This will probably need updating if they receive an additional allocation.)
3. If you run a DNSBL or RHSBL, list the domain and the network allocation. If you maintain a list of spammer/phisher/abuser domains, add the domain.
4. If you run an ISP or similar operation, make it a policy that any user participating in this scam will be terminated immediately. Same for mailing lists, web forums, newsgroups, etc.
5. Do not hire anyone who has ever worked for socialloot.com. Make sure that words spread that working for spammer Gary Munitz is toxic.