I don’t really watch much in the way of television these days. I’m more of an accidental watcher, encountering shows when they are on the TV whilst I am visiting friends. I’ll watch an occasional movie, but most of the stuff that Hollywood puts out bores me to death. I’m not a film snob, I couldn’t tell you what something means, or why a director picked a particular location or technique in his attempt to convey a certain message so it is not like I even watch independent movies specifically. I just find that life is too short to passively sit there and watch someone else’s entertainment product, there’s too many things I want to be doing to sit in front of a screen and not interact with it.
But hey, I’m trying to keep up on modern technology and various internet services, and sometimes I feel like catching up on something such as Good Eats or Mythbusters. I thought Hulu would be an ideal service to sign up for and get a semi-regular fix, they also offer a free 7-day trial so I can check it out for a week and cancel if I don’t like it or am not using it.
Off I trundled to the Hulu website, all ready to sign up, credit card in hand because that’s how these 7-day free trials often work. The registration form wants the standard stuff, email address, name. Okay, I can supply a fake name and made-up email address that will work for the purposes of this that can send all of their spam and marketing in to a black hole but still work for when I need to recover a password. But now it wants First Name and Last Name, hmm, okay, nothing too out of the ordinary there, and then it wants my birth date… um… why?
So the software can screen only age appropriate content?
No, probably not as anybody else could use my account or watch over my shoulder.
The web page goes on to require my zip code, not for billing purposes, I’m not even at the billing screen yet, this is purely for marketing purposes.
And finally, hey, Hulu wants to know gender too.
Amazing! What next year? Websites will need to know blood type or income level before letting you watch TV?
What does my gender or zip code or name have to do with signing up for a subscription based TV service? Oh, that’s right, so you can advertise and market to me under the guise of ensuring I receive “relevant” content. Gosh, they even have a message “we promise to always keep this information confidential” so that makes me instantly want to trust them more because if it’s on a company’s website, the company must obviously stand by everything they say they’ll do. Except for when it inconveniences them and makes it difficult to make money off of your marketing data.
So yeah, supplying lots of data to be able to watch TV which I don’t much care for anyway? No, I don’t think so. Nobody needs to know any more about the person signing up for a service than the billing address. If information requirements go beyond that, it is highly suspicious as to why a company is collecting the data.
It comes back to who gains the benefit when this data is supplied, me or the company? And in pretty much every case, it’s the company. If there is no direct, tangible benefit to the end-user, there is no reason to collect the data.