Attention and personal details as forms of payment

Two prices are commonly charged for free things and neither appears on a receipt.

The first is attention. A thing that costs no money can still cost a great deal of time, and time is the resource with the hardest limit. Services designed to be engaging are frequently designed by people whose success is measured in how long you stay, which is a perfectly legal arrangement and one worth understanding. A free evening spent somewhere pleasant is well spent. A free evening that vanished without producing enjoyment or rest or anything else was charged for and delivered nothing. The test is simple and personal: afterwards, did you feel you had gained something or merely passed time.

The second is information about you. Signing up is often the price, and what you provide has value to whoever collects it. This is not automatically sinister, since plenty of organisations need contact details for entirely ordinary reasons. It is, though, worth a moment's thought about how much is actually required. A field marked optional can be left empty. A separate address kept for sign-ups keeps things tidy. Permissions granted quickly can be reviewed later. And the request for far more detail than the service plausibly needs is a signal in itself, quite apart from any other consideration.

The practical stance is neither refusal nor resignation. Decide what a thing is worth to you in time and detail before accepting, rather than afterwards. Accept the ones that pass. Decline the ones that do not, and notice that declining is usually costless. And apply a little extra care to anything asking for identifiers, financial details or access to accounts, because the standard for those should be considerably higher than the standard for a mailing list. Free is a fine reason to try something. It is not a reason to skip the question you would ask about anything else.