While I'm Thinking About It

While I'm Thinking About It

A Test

There is a particular website out there, Wowio.com, whose reason for being seems to be giving away free books. After a fashion. The "books" are actually downloadable PDF's, with advertising in the back. It's gaining some notoriety in the webcomicosphere (which is hardly a worse word than blogosphere), which is good since there hasn't been any good drama in too long.

One the one hand, you have defenders making the argument that the personal information they require to sign up for an account is a legitimate request since they're paying folks whose work gets downloaded, and need to verify people aren't cheating. And yes, information gets shared with advertisers, but only in the aggregate type of form that legitimate advertisers like because it lets them see what kind of demographics they should be targetting. That was a long sentence.

On the other hand, you have this. The information they want is either too risky to be shared in the open internet, or too tempting in the long run not to sell off to the evil spam merchants whose questionable offerings already make up the vast bulk of the email I receive.

I am going to run an experiment. I now have a new, special, non-generic email address. To keep suspicion down, said address comes from a domain I own that is not TRU-Life Adventures. It has one function--to sign up for a Wowio account. It will not be posted here, or anywhere. It will not be used in any other forms or message boards. If this email address ever receives anything that is not specifically from Wowio, I will know their privacy policy is bunk and will say so as clearly, and as loudly, and as often as I know how.

This should be fun.