Signing with Survey Companies Can Open the Floodgates of Spam

One work-at-home approach that has become popular in recent years is taking paid online surveys for market research groups. Though some companies make inflated claims regarding the income one can draw from it, people can and do earn cash and other rewards by giving their opinions on a variety of products and services.

Survey directories that advertise on the web recommend that people maximize their potential earnings by signing up with as many research companies as possible. For a fee, they'll provide access to 300-500 names and web addresses on average. Each of these companies will have different policies regarding the frequency of their invitations, the types of surveys they offer, and the possible incentives for taking them.

Before signing up, read each company's "terms of use" and "privacy policy" sections carefully. Many promise to keep your identity anonymous. Others will sell or trade your personal information - including your name, telephone number and e-mail address - to third parties. These "partners" may then approach you by e-mail or phone with often-dubious offers and survey opportunities.

In other words, if you agree to the terms and policies of market research groups that make liberal use of the information you give them, you may soon be inundated with telemarketer calls and e-mail spam.

I've been involved with online surveys for several months. I watched the amount of junk mail in my bulk folder grow from 10-20 messages to over 100 a day. It was too time-consuming for me to sort through and delete all of this manually, so I eventually had to turn my spam-filter up full blast. I no longer had to see the unwelcome messages, but I lost a lot of good, legitimate mail in the process. I know this because I've received phone calls from survey companies saying that the invitations they'd sent me had been returned as undeliverable.

The law requires every company to provide an "unsubscribe" link in their e-mail messages, so that one can opt out of receiving any more invitations from them. But unsubscribing from one market research group will not remove your name and contact information from all the third-party lists that they may have submitted you to. Once the chain of referrals begins it soon becomes overwhelming.

It's advisable for anyone interested in taking paid online surveys to at least begin by only signing on with companies whose policy is to keep all their members' information private. Once you've opened up the floodgates, you might find it impossible to keep up with the tidal wave of spam mail that will likely result.