No More Fun?

There was an article in the NYTimes today “No More Innovation for the Fun of It”.  The point of the article was that many of the big companies like Apple and Google have turned into businesses that really only care about money.  And in that pursuit they do things like capture information and figure out ways to use it to gain more money.

This reminds me of a common practice that our friends at Active.com use.  Here is their privacy policy and a key sentence – “Active uses your information to perform transactions, deliver services or information you have requested, and offer you products and services from Active and our trusted partners, programs or services that we believe may be of interest to you.”

What this means is that you pay $3.25 to sign up for a $25 race.  They then start sending you emails.  Most of those emails contain ads from races and others – they are making money from your email.  They try to direct runners to their website to sell more ads.  And of course they have gone far beyond running in terms of their focus and business model.

At RunSignUp, we are all about running and having fun.  Our privacy policy is pretty simple: “we DO NOT sell or share your information with anyone except the Event Director for races you register for at RunSignUp.com.”  And we love creating new ways for runners to come together – for example our new, free Sites offering that allows any running group to create a website for free.  Even if you decide to use Active.com as an your registration method to spam your friends and runners…