What's your online privacy worth to you? If the answer is $5, Google has a great new deal you might like to consider.

As if it doesn't already know enough, the search engine monolith has devised a new way to gain insights into what people do online. It's going to pay them.

Dubbed Screenwise, the plan involves offering people a $US5 Amazon gift card for signing up and further gift cards for each three month block they remain part of the program. At the time of writing, Screenwise was already over subscribed and Google wasn't taking any further participants but they are likely to re-open the virtual doors shortly.

Participants must download a browser plug-in that sits quietly in the background and tracks the sites they visit and how they interact with pages and content. Details are then sent back to the Google mothership for analysis.

The move is interesting if for no other reason than it demonstrates how valuable online data about individuals has become. Businesses around the world are desperate to learn more about what people do online and where they go to do it. Having this data puts Google in an even more powerful place when it comes to delivering targeted advertisements for its customers.

There are some who argue that online privacy is a contradiction in terms anyway and so we should not be concerned with allowing businesses to peak at everything we do.

But there are others who think it's an individual's right to expect some privacy when they're going about their online existence.

Will you be signing up to Google's latest offer, or do you prefer keeping your kimono closed?