Why does IN.com need my Mobile Number?
Get a short and sweet email id from IN.com. But wait, they want only users from India. Today morning I got this sweet message from IN.com team-
You have logged in to IN.com five times till now, but haven’t validated your mobile number yet. We need a valid mobile number to make sure you can continue using your account.
Why have we limited the registration to only one account per valid mobile number? Well, it’s to ensure that everybody gets the short, nice email address they like and no single person registers several accounts for himself. Also, it ensures that we limit registrations to people in India, our target audience, for the time being.
If you don’t validate your mobile number, we’ll keep your account on hold for up to a month, after which, the ID you used will be open for registration by other users again.
Cheers, The IN.com Team
It says that IN.com needs user mobile number to confirm if the user is from India. Well this requirement can be satisfied by just verifying the IP address of the users while registering. It also says that IN.com wants avoid multiple registrations. Most of us have 1-2 active email addresses. We use temporary email ids for a short period time and leave it inactive. Most email companies delete the mail account after certain period of inactivity and release the user name for registration. IN.com will delete my account if I don’t validate my mobile number. Isn’t more user accounts means more page views and hence more money. IN.com doesn’t think so
Well, aggregation looks like big business. The terms and conditions of IN.com is available only on the registration page which is also not accessible. Since I don’t have access to their terms page, I assume that they may keep an eye on what their users read, listen, search (flight, matrimonial etc) and collect data. They may use this data to create a unique profile for each user. Once they have traction they may leverage this profile to advertise on their website. So personalized advertisement huh?
And you may never know, they may even send you a SMS from advertiser. Did someone say that India has more mobile users than internet users? 
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