Freedom, <em>If</em>...

Amit Varma writes that there's a new newspaper out. It's called Mint and the bit he loves about it, is

finally, India has a newspaper that explicitly supports the values of freedom, in all its forms, that I hold so dear.

And this newspaper that "explicitly supports the values of freedom", gives you "free" access to all content on its website, as long as you give up the following information

• Your first name
• Your last name
• Email address
• Gender
• Country
• City
• Year of Birth
• Educational Background
• Occupation
• Whether you "currently subscribe to print newspaper" (Whatever that means)

In addition to this, it also requests you for your

• Mobile Number
• Industry
• Household Income Range

The reason they ask for all this information is

Registering with us signifies your complete agreement with our terms and conditions. [Emphasis mine]

These terms and conditions, or terms of use, never actually show up during the registration process, by the way.

The "Registration-required" debate, when it comes to news sites, has been going on for years now. As Adrian Holovaty says in a post on the subject , the news sites seem to be saying

The benefit of registration is that you get the content.

One of the articles that Amit's linked, is titled "What you can expect from Mint." You need to register to read that article too, of course.
So in the case of Mint, the benefit of registration is that you get to find out what kind of content you can expect.

For a website that Google doesn't even know about yet (screenshot for the sake of posterity), I think they're approaching this the wrong way.

So basically, if ever I decide that I really want to read something they have there, I'm going to use Bugmenot. Otherwise I'll probably Google for the info and get it from somewhere else.