It's not the money, it's the eternal emails

I am a fan of the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot" https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot, especially the series on airline crashes or near-crashes. I'm not sure why, but I like them. The Swedish owner "Petter" has a variety of sponsors. One sounds kind of appealing to me, "Curiosity Stream", which would offer a wide variety of documentaries. What amuses me is how he emphasizes how it's only $20 a year, and you can get $5 off if they use his code, and to top it all off there's a money-back guarantee (I'm making up the specifics, but you get the idea). Presumably others with sponsors make the same sort of pitch.

But the price has nothing to do with why I won't subscribe. I'd happily pay twice that much. I won't subscribe because once I did, and my information got into their database, my expectation is that I would never, ever be able to free myself of the various promotions and "junk email" arising from that purchase. Possibly if you look carefully there's a way to opt out of them selling your information to others, but it wouldn't stop they themselves from sending me promotional email forever. Or they would change their terms of service, or Curiosity Stream would be bought by a bigger organization who would inherit the access to your information, and send you promotions for far more products. Basically, my perception is that one way or the other they've got you. Perhaps writing a blog post with "Curiosity Stream" in it will bring me to their attention and get me on their lists.

You could create an identity with links to entities you're not sure you want to hear from forever and then shed it every so often, like Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose shed his antlers. Perhaps some service could help you with this. But perhaps the marketers have a clever way of rediscovering people if the new identity subscribes to some of the same things as the old one.

If there was a service that guaranteed they would use your identity for the sole purpose of the subscription you make, and never ever send you another email or share your information, on pain of criminal penalties vigorously enforced, I think they might have a market -- if we could ever really trust them.

I'll also share one way I stayed naive until just a few years ago. When you belong to something like the ACLU, they send messages like, "your membership is about to expire!" and "last chance!" and I somehow got the idea that if I didn't respond then I'd lose my chance to be a member and they'd take me off their mailing list. Ha! Of course they won't ever take me off because they'll always be hoping I'd come back and give them more money. (The ACLU has lost its way -- they have become "woke" at the expense of protecting civil liberties.)