Become a Member? Of a TV Station?

I have now found the heinous mem­ber­ship page on the KING5 web­site. I’m not sure how a got there the first time, and to be fair when I went there on pur­pose — by click­ing on the top nav bar — I had no trou­ble using the back but­ton to return to the page I was read­ing when I dis­cov­ered the but­ton. Nonetheless check this out:

Notice the check box­es at the bot­tom? Notice that they are checked by default? Want to see what’s under the lit­tle ques­tion mark?

Surprise — you almost opt­ed into an online mar­ket­ing net­work. Can you say mas­sive junk mail in your inbox. That you’ll nev­er man­age to stop, ever. In fact efforts to stop the junk mail by click­ing on unsub­scribe only bring more junk mail. And you can’t com­plain. Because you gave them per­mis­sion.

Oh sor­ry, you thought you were sign­ing up to be a mem­ber of KING5. Uh…how do you “be a mem­ber” of a TV sta­tion anyhow?

PS While doing this lit­tle exer­cise three new mini-windows con­tain­ing ads and sev­er­al requests to install cook­ies from bluestreak.com, questionmarket.com, specificclick.com, and interclick.com among oth­ers showed up.

I give up. The video pissed me off anyway.