Lockerz online surveys

This is the final part of an investigation of the new Lockerz website (Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here).

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How does Lockerz make a buck?

So far I have talked about pointz, but I have not really talked about how Lockerz generates its income, they seem to be giving stuff away for free, right?

Well of course there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. The most obvious way Lockerz earns money is through market research aimed at a clearly defined demographic group: young people.

You can earn points by answering online survey questions at the site. The Lockerz folk call these online surveys “dailies”. Today's dailies, for example, include the question “What summer film won your heart?” and provide a text box for your answer.

As well as basic market research questions like this, Lockerz also has dailies that can be used to further refine the demographic, for example today’s site asks “Would you wait five hours in line for a pair of limited edition sneakers?” By answering this question, Lockerz can classify you as someone who cares about their sneakers, and filter them out from people like me who wear carpet slippers that have a hole in the bottom.

 

It is unclear what Lockerz does with the answers you give to their dailies, but as their terms of use say “if you send us your creative or original concepts or ideas or any confidential or proprietary information” you “automatically grant Lockerz a perpetual, worldwide, unlimited, irrevocable, transferable, assignable, sublicenseable, royalty-free license to use the Submissions and feedback, and exercise all copyright, publicity and other rights with respect to any such Submissions and feedback” the likelihood is that they will be selling their highly-targeted marketing data to just about anyone they like.

Oh, the opportunities of that!

 

Lockerz adheres to a lower limit on the age of their members at thirteen, “Pursuant to the terms of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).” Users must confirm that they have reached their thirteenth birthday, or otherwise get parental consent before they can register as a member of the site. However, if you as a parent, provide information about your child to Lockerz, you consent to Lockerz using that information as they see fit.

 

my Conclusions on Lockerz

Lockerz then is an online survey site with its own proprietary currency (pointz) that you earn by providing personal information about yourself, and which can in turn be used by Lockerz and its partners to gather market research data and to target you with relevant advertising.

In this way, it is not much different from the many other get-paid-for-completing-surveys sites out there. (See here for some good advice about online paid surveys.)

The main distinguishing characteristic of Lockerz is its demographic target audience, teenagers and young adults – that “z” generation.

As Lockerz has so many young members, it seems to me that it has a moral duty to take very good care of the personal information that is being collected at the site. I have no objections at all to  market research; it’s an essential oil for economic efficiency.

However, I would have liked to see more, much more information about how Lockerz intend to use all that personal data they are collecting, and how it will be associated with the survey data, to whom it will be sold, and so on. At the moment, this information is not available to me. And presumably it’s not available to 350,000 other parents either.

 

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This was the third and final part of an investigation of the new Lockerz website (Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here).

 

If you would like to comment on this article, or comment on Lockerz itself and how it works, add a comment below. But please do not advertise your Lockerz invite site or tell me that they are “scammers who must die”. If you do, I will remove your comment.

 

And if you’re a parent with your own Old Fogie web site, you could always put up some linkz to this article to help spread the word ;-)