Don't get suckered into projects who give you "free" cryptocurrency

A lot of people are looking for small revenue streams. Yesterday there was a post about a company that gave you "free" cryptocurrency for walking.

What most of these projects have in common is that they predate on your data, and are only giving you a small piece of the earnings they make for your personal data.

Some of the often seen scams or privacy violations:

Giving you cryptocurrency for IRL actions:

These companies will often require you to excersise, walk around, visit locations, etc, but their main goal is to get your geolocation along with personal identifiers, that they then sell on to advertisers or data brokers.

Giving you cryptocurrency for using their services:

These companies primarily rely on the free cryptocurrency to incentivise you to come and visit their app or website over and over again. This is a much cheaper way of advertising their services than using a regular advertisement campaign on social medias, or search engines. Not nessecarily a bad thing. But these companies are often the victims of hacks and leaks, so don't give any info up that you don't want others to have.

Giving you cryptocurrency for your e-mail and KYC:

Some of these companies are completely legit and just require KYC for various legal reasons, however others are sketchy and will for sure use that data to sell on to advertisers or data brokers. The "best" case scenario for these are the big exchanges such as Binance or Coinbase that has learn-to-earn programs, the worst case scenario is your own data used to phish you more efficiently.

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For a lot of people this isn't an issue; we have already gotten used to our data being sold in exchange for using free services such as Facebook, Google, E-mail providers and all the other services where your data is the "payment".

But in case you care about your data not being resold without your knowledge, this is good to know.

Moons is a rare exception to this, since they don't take any personal information from you, and only require you engaging in the community to earn.