Hate Life, Will Travel

When you run a web site, you never want to ask people for more information than you have to. If you’re signing them up for an email newsletter, you only really need their email address, and that’s all they want to give you.

King 5 is a local Seattle TV station. To register for things like being able to see some content, and junk like that, you have to provide:

Email address
Confirm it (bleah)
Password
Confirm password

That’s reasonable enough.

Then it requires:
First Name
Last Name
Gender
Year of Birth

So immediately, in that first section, that’s too much information that you can be fairly sure they’re going to use to go out and buy up your demographic data. THis is then followed by (still required):
Select your favorite hobbies or interests. Check as many boxes as you would like

and still more personal information.

Address
Country
City
State
Zip Code
Telephone
and
Typically, how do you get your copy of a local newspaper?

If you weren’t convinced something fishy was going on before, well, this should set off all kinds of alarm bells. Telephone number? Really? What possible reason do they have for requiring my phone number?

It’s crazy. I suspect King 5 must suffer a massive abandon rate. There’s nothing they could possibly keep behind such a registration wall that would justify me giving up that kind of information (unless I make it up).

It’s almost as bad as their newscasts.