Sins of The Internet: Signup Junkie

I admit it. I used to be one of those people who signed up for everything on the internet. You name it, I signed up for it. For over a year I must have joined at least two programs every single day. By the time I regained my senses, I had over 700 accounts and passwords recorded in my password book!

It's all so enticing! Ah, the thrill of getting something for free. You know what I mean. A free mousepad to leave my email address with that printer manufacturer. Another site had a free calendar which I could put on my website ... all I had to do was enter my personal information and add some hypertext to my pages. Yet another gave me an email every day reminding me of my seven contest entries for the day.

Oh yes, those were the days. It actually started with Yahoo! I fell in love with Yahoo! in those naive times. What a great place to go. And I got lots of "free" stuff in return for some simple personal information. I didn't see any harm in telling them these things ... after all, they promised to keep my information private and it appeared like I was getting something useful in return.

I moved on to webrings. These are small fragments of hypertext which you add to your website to form a kind of navigational system, allowing people to hop from site to site until they return to the site from which they started. Each webring had a signup page, and it seemed harmless to give some information to the ringmasters.

Over the next year, I discovered sweepstakes and I signed up for them all (dozens of sites). I found tons of free webmaster utilities, and signed up for everything even though I couldn't possibly include all of them if I wanted to! I even signed up for ten different types of guestbooks (like I would use them), two dozen banner exchanges (worthless) and hundreds of affiliate programs.

I admit it, I was a signup junkie.

It's so tempting to sign up for free stuff. Yet this has to be resisted. Why? Because one fact that I've learned again and again is you don't want to be giving out your private information any more than you have to.

Why not? Because that information is valuable, and as such it will be used. It does not matter what the privacy policy says - the data is being used for something or they would not be asking for it.

Give out your email address too many times, and you will find it very difficult to reduce the incredible amount of spam that you will receive (I was getting over 500 emails per day when I finally started deleting myself from all of these programs). You will find that at least a few of these "free" sites will sell your email address (and other information) to spammers.

The other information is equally valuable. Your address can be sold for mass mailings of product information. Your phone number is perfect for telemarketers. Your social security number and birthdate are the most valuable of all - criminals can use these to steal your identity.

But isn't all of that free stuff valuable?

Think about it for a minute. If it was valuable, would they be giving it away? If that ebook about how to get rich was so valuable, wouldn't they charge an arm and a leg for it instead of giving it to you in return for your email address?

Don't get me wrong, some of these free things are of value. One item that comes to mind immediately are free guestbooks. This is the perfect freebie - it's simple, straightforward and useful. The only problem is that to use the guestbook you have to send your visitors off your site, but perhaps that's not a big issue to you. Personally, I decided I would rather keep my hard earned visitors - so I installed a guestbook script directly on my site.

So what's my advice? Simple. When you find a new program save the URL in your favorites. Then sit back and think about it for a while. Read through their mission statement, privacy policy and any other materials on their website. Look for their site in the Better Business Bureau. In other words, check them out. Once you've thought about it either delete it from your favorites or go back and sign up.

Why not just sign up without thinking? Because your information is valuable - or they wouldn't be asking for it. And if it's valuable then you should not be giving it away willy-nilly. If fact, one way to think of it is you are trading your personal information for a product or service. The currency used in the trade is your name, address, phone number and whatever else they want to get.

Others things to remember before getting that new doo-dad for your web site are:

• Will this company be around in a year? Remember that you will be incorporating this into your site - do you really want to have to edit it out later if they go down?
• Do you really need it or is it just fluff? It's wise to be cautious about adding too many bangles to a website - this tends to make people click away pretty quick. Simple is generally better.

For other services, stop and think if you really need that free thing. I know it's shiny and pretty and, well, free - but do you need it? Just because you got a free ebook for giving out your email address does not mean that the ebook has any value. Besides, if you put the ebook title into a search engine, chances are you will find it or the same information without having to give them anything.

What's the bottom line? Be cautious about giving out your personal data, and don't sign up for every single program. Don't be a signup junkie.

That's all I've got to say about that.