A lot of websites these days require you to sign up before acessing their content. Even if they don't ask you for money, you still have to fill out a form with a bewildering array of details, including your job, your earnings, shoe size, dog's name, etc. Why do they do this? So that they can sell these details to marketing companies that use it to target advertising towards different sections of the population.

But a backlash has started. As reported in advertising blog Adrants (www.adrants.com/), a petition has been started by some internet users, tired of demands for registration, who have declared the 13th November as 'Internet Advertiser Wakeup Day'. They have launched an on-line petition (see address below) asking the petition signers to register tonnes of fake sign-ups to some of the top internet-registration offenders (mainly US newspapers such as the New York Times) to clog these companies' marketing databases with bogus information.

How is the marketing industry responding to this? Tom Hespos, of Underscore Marketing, has said that the issue just needs to be sold better: 'The hard-core privacy activists will always rail against registration, but I think the average consumer can come to understand why registration is important to publishers.' Ironically, this article was published on http://ww.mediapost.com, where registration is needed to access the full content. Never fear: Corporate Watch -- being a bunch of hard core privacy activists -- used a bugmenot password to access Tom's article. Bugmenot is an internet-based collection of passwords, free for anyone to use, without having to go through a boring sign-up process, or give over personal details. For now at least, grassroots creativity is still a step ahead of the internet marketeers.

Get your passwords here:
www.bugmenot.com/

Sign the petition here:
www.petitiononline.com/adwakeup/petition.html