The Premise
There's an app for the Android market called Panel which offers rewards and prizes for sharing your location with it. After installation it runs in the background and silently sends your location data to their server every hour or so. If you're close to a company that they partner with then you may receive a survey for bonus points. The idea of the app seems like Big Brother trying to keep tabs on you... but it's not too much different than checking in with Facebook or Four Square. The only real difference is that with Panel the people running the company will get a more holistic idea of where you go during the day instead of just where you eat or stop in at.
Free Gift Cards
Panel will tell you about how many points you should receive per day and then translates that into a general yearly number of points. They're very straight-forward in how much gift cards cost ($5 Amazon card is 5,000 points) and truly don't try and trick you. It seems that with running Panel for a year (and factoring in bonuses) you could end up with somewhere around $20 to $50 in gift cards. Really it's not too bad for doing absolutely nothing.
Things to Consider
Some things that you'll need to consider is that now a company knows how you spend your day. They'll have a general idea of when you're home and when you're at work. A lot of the surveys you receive revolve around "Where were you at 6:45 pm on May 19th?" then proceed to give a list of stores that you were nearby. If you're willing to give this information out for about $50 a year then I'd say download Panel and start saving!
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