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Turning Up The Heat On On-Line Registration
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "CNN is running a story on the growing number of print newspapers with on-line editions that are requiring registration. Apparently there are some folks out there who don't like this 'feature'! I found a few things interesting about the story: Privacy groups say it's a dangerous practice and promotes spam; I didn't realize people put real personal info into these things (110-year-old surgeons from Bulgaria named Mickey Mouse). About 15 to 20 percent of the registrations for the Philadelphia Inquirer turned out to be bogus, a figure that was much lower than I would have thought. Also mentioned in the story is a web site called BugMeNot.com, which lists 'communal' logins and passwords for on-line newspapers."
Haha, wouldn't it be a kicker if someone made a subscription account public so everyone could read the articles from the distant future...
[insert witty comment here]
Of course, now that BugMeNot has been publicized, how long until all these sites check that site often and just disable all accounts that ever get listed there?
I live in Austin. I used to read the Statesman online, but now they require registrations, and the damn thing asks for the password every single time.
So, I read www.kxan.com instead. I think that no matter where I turn, I can find an equivalent article from a competitor. Even content such as what salon.com carries can be found elsewhere. Slate.com and theatlantic.com can give me lots to think about when salon.com's advertisements fail to run on Linux.
So, no biggie. If they make it easy for me, I'm content to set myself up as a 99 year old woman from Ahzerbaijahn. But if they bug me twice about it, or if they fail to test their advertizing/authentication scheme with the browser that I choose to use, then I'll never visit their shithole again.
So long, Austin American Statesman. You suck!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Just a theory, of course, but I bet the newspapers could care less what info. you use to register, as long as you do. And if you register with a new name every time, even better-- that's twice the number of readers they can claim to have to their advertisers.
They found that 10-15% of email addresses are bogus. This makes perfect sense, because most users who register probably figure that they need to recieve an e-mail to confirm registration, (even if you don't, as in the case of the Philadelphia Inquirer). If you look at Name/address/phone number/other personal info, then the amount of falsified data is probably at 85%+. Of course, there's no way to run a database queue to find out how much of that is fake, since they can't just count bounced e-mails. But to the companies e-mail is really all that matters anyway, so the fact that the other info is fake is moot.
No sane advertiser will pay for a spot based on research data where such an easily checked piece of data is already proven to be false 1 out of 5 times. Income, job, interest are then likely to have a far higher error rate.
I do know that newspapers have to make money and that giving their content away for free does not make too much sense. But this doesn't make sense either.
If they want to get info let them start with basic geographic data. Don't show someone with a european IP ads for america only products. Surely that shouldn't be that hard?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
> It's more a matter that there is no point them having my details. What do they gain?
Mass marketing information. The more personal they can make their "exclusively mailed to the general public" mailings, the better. And, if their customer list is feature (read: information) rich, they can sell it to others for a higher price.
The internet is a huge resource of information, and if people are uncomfortable or feel that their privacy has been infringed by being asked personal information, there are plenty of other sites that carry the same news.
Demographic information is a very valuable resource, but only if accurate information is submitted. But for now, there's no stopping those who value privacy from posting bogus info.
bout 15 to 20 percent of the registrations for the Philadelphia Inquirer turned out to be bogus, a figure that was much lower than I would have thought.
I thought the same thing, but almost every time i ask a nontech-savvy person, they tell me they put their real info in. Also, many of these people will also put your email in to those 'send this to 5 friends for $1 off!' type deals. I have had to teach everybody in my family that when you do things like this it adds to spam. Some of them seem to think that its wrong to give fake information, or that you may be tracked down or something. people need to be educated about this stuff!
With great timeliness, the Globe and Mail (Canada) just started asking for a registration today. But it seemed to only ask for the polls. So then they also gain email-verified poll results.
The G&M is pretty well-respected, and it seems likely that their web-polls were getting spammed by political operatives, since they've been running many about the upcoming Federal election.
Bogus details is like pirating shareware. It isn't hard, it isn't murder, but it isn't right, either.
Of course, it depends somewhat on what kind of privacy protections your country has, and what data they ask for. I don't like giving out salary data. The G&M only asked for a postal code.
-Rob
-Rob Ewaschuk
It's amazing how many websites already have billg@microsoft.com, info@sco.com darl.mcbride@sco.com and other common addresses already registered as an active user. This usually works for the, "enter your email and we'll spam you before you can proceed" registrations like on Quicktime or Pinnacle Patches or thing like that...
"We helped the first group through it. We reassured most all of the second group with a strong privacy policy. The third group still doesn't like it and I presume many of them did not register with us," he said.
It seems like everyone likes to say that they have a strong privacy policy, but it is often the case that the claim of a strong privacy policy is just a bunch of reassuring words with no basis in reality (remember Toysmart? And from what I understand, not much has happened regarding attempts to create legislation.). As long as there are no laws in the US that regulate the use of personal data that are comperable to the laws in Europe, these newspapers could pretty much do whatever they want to with the data.
Now fine, I understand that these newspapers need to get advertisers' money in order to survive. But why not be straightforward about it? For example, if they asked readers to do anonymous surveys in order to help their advertisers, they would probably get far more favorable response than this register-all-your-personal-data-so-we-can-lie-to-y ou-about-not-selling-it-to advertisers bullshit they're doing now.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
The actual quote was:
The Philadelphia Inquirer started online registration in March, asking readers for e-mail, home address, gender and birth date. About 10 percent to 15 percent of the 300,000 registrations to date have bad e-mail addresses, said Fred Mann, general manager of Philly.com.
Just because an email address will accept mail does not mean the rest of the information is accurate in any way. I have a few junk-dropper email addresses that I'll point these things to in case there is something it might send that I would need (like a password). But the rest of the information can be totally false...
So the real amount of bad data may be closer to the number you were thinking of in the first place (I'd guess 30-40% bogus registrations myself).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The trouble is that most of the spam comes from compromised PCs nowadays. So the person does not need to give your address to anybody -- you will start getting spam once virus finds its way to their system. I even receive spam to an address I gave to employees of very reputable company (where I'm sure they did not give out the info to marketeers).
True but NY Times.com will present you with colorful ads when you read it on-line.
Just like they do when you pick up a print copy. What's next? You're not going to eat unless the food is free and no strings attached?
Ummmm... Why do people bitch about the beer not being free?
What is the big deal? The washington post, nyt, etc are comercial operations and have to pay to keep the lights on. You can pay to read the newspaper in print or read it online for free provided you give them something in trade (i.e. account info).
They have to pay those journalists and pay for the Reuters/AP feeds. If you want to read their stuff, be prepared to trade for it. $/ or info.
If you want free beer, there are a million crappy blogs...
No, how much information they want is not your call to make , it's definitely theirs.
But it is entirely your call whether or not to give that information, or forego the use of their service.
They all know damned well that just becase they ask for information doesn't mean they'll get it. They're also probably aware that their readership will go down proportional to how much information they want, so they make a judgement as to how valuable that information is to them.
You make that same judgement....
Also, the parent was not equating incorrect information with piracy, he was comparing...there is a big difference. His comparison was not entirely without merit. You can choose to ignore the nag screens on Shareware, and continue using it for free, just as you can enter false data in the registration pages of a service, therefore getting it for free. In both cases the providers of the software or the service are aware that this will happen, and are counting on enough people to be honest to make it worthwhile. But being one of the expected dishonest people does not make you any less dishonest....
Advanced users are users too!
I care about it, that's who. Their one article, which will be old in 24 hours, is not adequate compensation for providing them and their advertisers with my personal information, which does not become old. The trade is not a good value, especially since news.google.com can find that exact article or a similar article elsewhere.
Only on
Hm, I don't know. Look at the whole picture: what safeguards are there that all of these businesses actually follow their privacy statements? I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't at least uncomfortably common for companies to sell these lists, thinking "Oh, how will they ever know it was us?" And unless you give a different e-mail address to each registration place and then keep track of where spam is sent to, they're right: you can't know who did it. And besides, everyone on the internet has probably been subjected to abusive and intrusive marketing in some form, such as spam, spyware, pop-ups...
It seems to me that if you expect people to be held to a strict standard of honesty in their relationship with companies involved in marketing, you have to demand that same standard of honesty from the companies. That is a responsibility marketing companies have, imho, not lived up to, and you can't be surprised when people grow suspicious of them.
Right, and he made the statement that he would not read their content as he doesn't like their rules.
The real problem here is that some sites are more professional about the whole privacy issue than others. Some, like the NYT seem to be very good. Other sites have been a huge mistake to sign up for, IT industry rags seem to be the absolute worst - I never sign up for those anymore with anything other than a disposable webmail account.
I'd like to see a useful accreditation for a site's privacy policy. As it stands right now a site with a good policy can change pretty much at the whim of the owners. Even a site that sincerely swears on a stack of bibles that they will never sell your info is subject to being sold to weasels who will bury you in spam.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
...people generating the audience know all too well about falsified sales figures. "Oh sorry your 100,000 clicks barely produced sales, here's a nickle for your trouble".
That's why they've mostly agreed on clicks as the "currency" of choice, since both can verify the number of clicks. Then the advertiser can look at his click-to-sales ratio and decide if it's worth it. Of course, this leads to the nefarious practice of redirecting innocents because they generate clicks.
Going by sales is better all around, particularly for the consumer, but it also requires a considerable higher level of trust between the companies involved.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That is because quite a few sites require you to actually enter a valid, working email-adress to be able to register, typically they'll send out a validation-email with a link for you to click on or something.
On the other hand, there's no reasonable way for a website to check any of the other info you put in, I am certain that more thouorugh research would show that though only 20% of the email-adresses where outrigth false (as in bounces), another significant part are "spam-only" or "throwaway" accounts, and even *more* of the info collected in all other fields is incorrect.
It'd not surprise me in the least if 75% lie when asked privacy-invading questions with no easy method of verification such as "household income", I know I do. This is more than enough to make the collected data complete junk, and negate any imagined positive effect of collecting it in the first place.
Sorry, this is just too much. Not everything is a right or discrimination.
Yes men should be allowed to view female targetted ads.
Realistically companies target their advertising to the intended customer. This isn't a violation of your rights. They just wanted to target a different group.
You would be wasting time selling Maybachs in trailer parks, so don't bother trying.
Got this username/password from bugmenot.com. Too bad I won't actually get any Karma if this comment should be modded up.
This account has been seized by the GNAA. That is all.
This is not the fault of those "selfish bastards" who block ads (I'm one of them BTW). The site owners are to blame. I've found that sites with text ads have ads that are much more targeted than those with banner ads. The Google Adsense program is an excellent example of this. Technically, you can block those ads, but I don't because they are usually related to the article I'm reading. I've seen other text ads outside of Google's program, and while they are not as targeted as Google's ads, they usually aren't as bad as banners. They are certainly less intrusive than an animated banner. After reading webmaster-related forums, such as webmasterworld.com, I get the feeling that text ads actually do better than image-based ads.
Up until a few months ago I was on dialup. Sites with several banner ads could take forever to download. Having a plugin like adblock for firefox made browsing much faster. I currently have cable, but I still use adblock, because there is no way in hell that I will ever click the kinds of banner ads that most sites display, i.e., ads for the same types of products and services for which I'm getting spam. Annoying me is not the way to get my money.
If I am paying someone to deliver stuff to my house, obviously I will give them my address, since I want them to find my house, and I don't mind giving them my personal details, since I feel that they are entitled to know enough about me to be able to track me down if I don't pay the money I owe them.
But online news (and other) sites are not selling me anything, nor do they have any other good reason to know who I am and where I live. They want my "subscription" for vaporous marketing reasons - so that they can target me with ads (which are of absolutely no interest to me and which I will block anyway), and so that they can tell sponsors/investors about the millions of subscriptions that they have (a mostly meaningless statistic).
I have never registered for any subscription-only news site. I can't be arsed to spend ten minutes making up stupid fake information and setting up a disposable address to throw to the wolves, because when I am skimming through dozens of Google News links, ten minutes is a long time. And the story is likely to be somewhere else, given that the only news I read on US news sites is world news (since I don't live in the US).
I'm not screaming about my "rights" or claiming that what they're doing is "eeevil" and should be stopped. It's not illegal, and if they want to do it, they can. However, I think they're providing bad service, and since subscription-free sites offer better service, they can stuff off.
Except that those sites are ad-supported. There is already a tradeoff going on there... You're trading eyeballs for info. That's not very risky. The thing about online registration is that you're trading a lot of safety for not much info. True, they could be nice and not spam your inbox, spam your house, clog up your phone with marketing calls... Maybe their tracking info doesn't monitor your entrances to aljazeer.net, or your propensity towards reading Palestenian sympathetic diatribes (Remember, everyone in the US government just bowed down and kissed the dead feet of a notoriously bad McCarthyist). They'd never hand that info over to someone who would misuse it. And OK, so they're running a system well and would never be hacked. But why take that risk?
What the free papers are offering are a large risk in exchange for not much reward, a risk that you wouldn't be asked to take if you were reading the dead tree edition. Would you read a newspaper if the newsstand man required a valid drivers license, and watched over your shoulder taking notes?
As what many people consider the only remaining viable source of information in this country, newspapers have a unique responsibility to the democracy. Just as voting is annonymous, so too must be information-gathering. Give that up, and who knows when the next witch hunt will find you...
The ______ Agenda
A newspaper's archive is priceless. Where else are you going to get the obit for a relative who died 15 years ago? Only one place, your local newspaper's library.
Or a public library for no cost at all to the reader. I think you meant "worthless," not "priceless" (And if we're talking about _my_ city paper, it actually has a negative value).
Isn't there a web standard data format for this subscription info? Like an incremental set of groups of info, starting with username/password, then adding real name, then contact (email), then phone/postal, then credit card, then demographic (age, occupation, etc), etc? A form would ask for , and you'd see a button marked "Send personal info". Click it, get a dialog box with the requested info items already entered, retrieved from the browser's local Preferences database. Each item would have a yes/no checkbox. Close the dialog with a button for "SEND" or "CANCEL"; "UPDATE" would open another dialog for editing the locally stored data.
The days of remembering personal data, spending time retyping it, and making mistakes would be gone. Multiple profiles, with different data selectable in the dialog, would manage different personality scenarios. Submission transactions would be logged. Resubscriptions, including revisions after identity theft, could be automated. And the submission could be digitally signed, with the hash kept as a receipt by both parties. The copyright on one's personal info could be enforced. Possibly a standard default license, requiring the recipient to supply a copy (minus private data) of every list to which one's identity has been added, with selectable optional stronger license requirements (payment, non-distribution, etc).
I recall some kind of "Privacy Platform" standard, but it never arrived, either stillborn or orphaned. Now we need it more than ever. Where is it?
--
make install -not war
When you get the newspaper at the newstand you PAY for it with MONEY. The bulk of that cost goes to defray the cost of printing. A major daily paper has HUGE expenses that keep going up, yet they don't raise the price of a paper very frequently.
The profits from a newspaper come from advertisers who are willing to pay a fair rate for print advertising because it works. So far most online advertising has failed to meet the expectations of advertisers, so they don't want to pay much for it.
Newspapers know that the world is changing around them and they are trying to adapt. Are they making the right choices? Don't know. I don't like registering any more than anyone else, but I do know that if newspapers don't figure out how to make a LOT more money online, they will cease to exist. The trend is for anyone younger than say 45-50 to get their news online rather than from print. The good news is that it costs a LOT less to publish online (newsprint costs are soaring -- newsprint is the paper itself). The bad news is that the BULK of the jobs at a large daily paper are NOT reporters and editors, but printers and circulation people. That equals a ton of lost jobs in the future if newspapers go totally online.
We're coming up on 10 years of large numbers of people actively using the Internet and we STILL haven't figured out a way to exchange money for information that people are willing to use that will generate enough money to make it worthwhile to provide that information. Yes I'm a capitalist. Yes I expect people provide goods and services only in exchange for SOMETHING that can be equated to money.
It is basically a paradox. People pay for Internet service, so they figure everything out there should already be paid for, yet if you required ISPs to pay into a fund that was distributed amongst all web sites and services, each site would make microscopic revenues and would cease to operate.
If you're dissatisfied with the quality of their free service, maybe you should ask for a refund.
Bad management trumps ideology - Show the world you want better leadership. http://www.timefornewmanagement.com
People here are always complaining about registering to read news. All those jokes about giving your first born child to the New York Times. Yeah, they're funny, but let's be serious for a moment.
First of all, the New York Times is a FOR PROFIT company. Second of all, they have employees to pay so that their employees can then eat and feed their families. They offer their service for free. All they ask in return is that you provide some information so that they can target ads. Is that so much to ask for? Would you rather just lay out cash?
Frankly, I was more than happy to provide the NYT with real registration information. I use their service and I'm very happy that they provide it for free. I'd be pretty upset if they had to start charging for it because everyone was sharing registrations or providing false information.
Complain about it all you want, but I think it's a very small price to pay. I registered years ago with correct information and to date, they have not sucked my checking account dry, trashed my computer, or done anything else sinister with the information that I'm aware of.
Too many people in the online community feel they're entitled to get stuff for free, but you have to remember that there are people behind the scenes, real people, with jobs that need to feed their families.
I'm personally very thankful that so many news sites do offer their stories for free.
"Don't you just love it when you watch your country slide into authoritarianism little by little each day."
And I'm still amazed at the numbers of europaens who can see what is going down in their own nations, and what is going down in the US, who just don't get it why a lot of us in the USA really want to hang on to our firearms. It's scary to think about it, but you have to look to history to see the actual *fact* that people who willingly disarm, to accept the notion that they are both incompetent to handle a tool and that their rulers are always going to be "nice guys", by either getting faked out into it or by force, are usually always eventually heinously persecuted by their own governments. It has happened so many times in the past....
Learn from history and do it better, or repeat the mistakes and suffer. The planetary amount of "crime" and violence is and never has been as high as the amount of "official crime" and violence perpetrated by out of control governments and their hired mercenaries, taken as an overall total. The timing changes some here and there, but eventually all governments become despotic, and becoming a willing victim in advance is a non smooth move.
I'm surprised there aren't more drop-in spam solutions that you could just apt-get install. I really don't want to spend a lot of time dicking around with mail server configuration, but the whole spam issue has forced me to spend countless hours beating on my mail server when I could have been off doing something else. It's very annoying...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
uce@ftc.gov
Might as well have them skip the part where they send it to me, and let them spam them directly.
Your suggestions would make it trivial for NYT/LATimes/WaPo/et al to ignore/redirect traffic coming from bugmenot.com.
By _not_ automating their system they make it more effective (i.e. make sure that the onus of blocking their efforts is on the registration end, not their end).
After all, while it's possible for any of these newspapers/etc. to write a custom app to extract the bugmenot.com data and cancel those accounts; however, that's significantly more work (that must be redone everytime that bugmenot.com changes formatting) vs. trivally filtering registrations originating from bugmenot.com.
Consider this social engineering (vs. technical).