The Price of the Information Age

Posted on January 22, 2003

As I was happily surfing the Net today, I happened to zip over to the Los Angeles Times website to check out the business entertainment news -- and received a nasty shock. All registrations before July, 2001 had been summarily wiped out. In order to access the site, you had to fill out yet another online registration form. Only this time, they wanted to know my income, my date of birth, my phone number, my address, the name of my first real boyfriend, if I'd ever used recreational drugs and various other very personal information (alright I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much). Then I was sent an email telling me to click on a link to activate my account. The email told me in bold red letters to hurry up and activate my account! And we mean now! No, not in a minute...now! By now, I felt my blood pressure rising as I got a cortisol kick, the heady afterburn of stress. It was implied, although not specifically stated, that if I didn't activate my account right away, something terrible might happen. Like, I might not find out which celeb has just headed off to rehab, what exec has just been indicted for insider trading, or whether Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock's wedding was really going to go forward, in light of all those Sheryl Crow rumors.

So I activated my account, thinking that was the end of it. But wait, there's more! I was asked to create a Product Profile. "This is getting really tedious," I thought to myself. But being a tenacious type, I soldiered on. It turns out that if you don't make your preferences known, you might inadvertently subscribe yourself to yet another three or four email newsletters, and you may have every bit of your personal information sold to merchants. People who generally don't read the instructions on anything in life are going to be bombarded with email newsletters and offers for some very targeted personal products, indeed. Being a compulsive reader, I was handily able to avoid these consequences. So, now I'm registered. It really wasn't that bad, was it? There's only one problem. I don't just read the L.A. Times. I also read The New York Times, Salon, The Wall Street Journal and a host of other online publications, all of which require either registration and/or a subscription.

What it really boils down to is this: what are you willing to put up with to read information for free? Online publications have to either charge a subscription fee, or use the print magazine model and charge for ads. Declaring that there is no more free lunch on the Web, Salon editor David Talbot has said that customers will either have to pay a subscription fee to see ad-free content, or they are going to have to agree to wade through some ads to see the content for free. Right now, most publications are still free, but they are starting to ask for more demographic information from their users: information which will help them sell ads to keep that content free.

So there are really three issues here, as I see it: 1) What information are you willing to pay for online? 2) What hassles are you willing to go through and what personal information about yourself are you willing to give to see information online for free? and 3) How in the world do you keep track of the 10,000 user names and passwords you will need to see this information, whether you paid for it or not?

The debate is just beginning. It will be interesting to see what happens.