Time to come up with a fake persona

Posted on February 5, 2004 by Gene

I think that even the most casual of readers here will notice that I often parrot the Washington Post. That’s because I read the paper each morning on the web as I lay in bed debating whether I will get up and go to work.
But no more: The Washington Post has decided that their ad-laden website, where articles are split into several pages in order to load even more ads, will henceforth require you to disclose your job title, description of job responsibility, size of your company, industry, e-mail address, password, gender, age, zip code, and home address. Your home address, where they state that they will not promise to send mail.
I think NOT.
Now comes the choice: is buying the paper now cheaper, privacy-wise, then reading it free online?

As an amusing aside, this story appeared on the front page of washingtonpost.com:

E-mail communication to and from The Washington Post was disrupted Thursday after its washpost.com Internet address was shut down because the company failed to renew its $35 annual registration.

The outage did not affect the ability of readers around the world to read the Post’s news Web site, which resides at a separate “domain,” washingtonpost.com. But the newspaper’s journalists and other employees, who rely on e-mail for communication with sources, advertisers and other clients, were without it for part of the day after washpost.com was shut down.

… Champ Mitchell, chief executive of Network Solutions, said that in the past six months the Post was sent “no less than seven” notifications that the registration was about to expire, most of them by e-mail. A manager in the newspaper’s technology division is listed as the contact for the account.
I guess now they have a good excuse for ignoring all the e-mails from the outraged readers reacting to their privacy-busting registration scheme. Sorry, Kat.