A Disturbing Trend… The Mandatory Sign-In
The era of free content is, for the most part, dead.
Save for the various independent blogs I follow, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend happening across the web: the mandatory sign-in.
Once reserved for news sites (like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, etc.), the mandatory sign-in is spreading in its use across the web. To read an article, one must first forfeit their email address. The rationale, as I am lead to understand, is that sites are trying to prevent spammers and bots from harvesting their content and infesting the comments section.
But what’s buried in the fine print when you sign in is that you are allowing yourself to be tracked across the site while also providing consent to receiving targeted advertising, marketing etc. from the site’s “partners”.
The only way around this barrier is to create a temporary email address.
Thankfully, there are a few ways to do this.
1) tmpmail lets you create a temporary email address and read messages directed to it, from within the terminal. This works exceedingly well for one-off throwaway email accounts, but requires some simple terminal-fu to set-up.
2) For Mac users, Apple offers “Hide My Email” which gives you the ability to add a custom domain name (i.e. bob@pcweenies.com) for your temporary email address. (Of course you’ll have to use your Apple ID to take advantage of this.)
3) Paid services (some work better than others). I have no interest in this approach.
The other option is to forgo content from sites that insist on having your e-mail address. I’m leaning heavily towards this approach, relying on RSS and Mastodon to find interesting articles and news.
-Krishna
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