Yeah, this seems _way_ less nefarious than what's going on behind the scenes to everybody else without their consent. At least they get people to consent and compensate them in this case, whereas nobody asks you whether you'd like to be tracked on the internet, and there's no way to turn it all off.
If I were to guess, this stuff isn't just "here's a router and we'll send you a check". There should also be a huge and very detailed survey the user needs to fill out so that Google could then correlated that data with similar demographics based on co-visitation.
This is also not new. Many years ago at Google I sat directly across the hall from the team that did demographic inference based on (IIRC) Nielsen panel data. I think it's safe to say that _every_ advertising company does this one way or another.
Basically at a high level they'd look at where Nielsen-paid tracked folks (about whom they knew everything) went on the web, and then looked at you, and their algorithm would guess your gender, age, income level, education level, etc etc.
If I were to guess, this stuff isn't just "here's a router and we'll send you a check". There should also be a huge and very detailed survey the user needs to fill out so that Google could then correlated that data with similar demographics based on co-visitation.
This is also not new. Many years ago at Google I sat directly across the hall from the team that did demographic inference based on (IIRC) Nielsen panel data. I think it's safe to say that _every_ advertising company does this one way or another.
Basically at a high level they'd look at where Nielsen-paid tracked folks (about whom they knew everything) went on the web, and then looked at you, and their algorithm would guess your gender, age, income level, education level, etc etc.