I noticed in the news that AOL has officially made all of its services free. They have also lowered their rates to $9.95 for dial-up service.
Their pitch is that all of their content including email is now free. They are really trying to get people to sign up for their free email.
So, I figured, what the heck. I will sign up for it if it's free. Just so I can review what a free AOL service is like.
If you haven't heard us say it before, AOL is not an Internet provider. Perhaps they were at one time, but today their specialty is advertising. They charge subscribers for a service that's primary purpose is to show those subscribers advertising. Every link in the AOL software is advertising based. Whether you click on shopping, weather, Internet security or news, every link in the AOL program is put their because someone paid for it to be there.
After I clicked on the link to sign up for a free account, it became very obvious that AOL intends to use force ads at every user of their free service in a variety of ways.
When you sign up for a free Google or Yahoo account, all you are required to provide is a name (real or otherwise), a zip code and maybe a birthday to prove that you are over 13 – the legal Internet age.
When I went to sign up for free AOL (don't think I completed the process for a second), AOL required everything. They wanted my full name (not just initials, my street address, my phone number, birthday, and they even required an email address.
You read that right. In order for me to sign up for a free AOL email address, I had to give them my email address.
Nothing says, "We really don't care about you, we just want your information," like requiring an email address to sign up for a free email address.
AOL is most definitely collecting all of this personal information and building a giant junk mailing list.
Rick and I have always talked about what a fair price would be for AOL internet service. As it turns out, even free for life isn?t enough for me to consider trying it out. I left the form incomplete and closed my browser. I am sure I will learn more about free AOL from those who are brave enough to give all of their contact information to them, but I am not that brave.
