No, I don’t want emails from the world’s most boring airport thanks

Auckland Airport would like to know if it can send me updates on its latest developments. Auckland Airport. Would I like to be kept up to date on all its exciting news?

Why no, Auckland Airport, I would not. I could not give the smallest stuff about your new duty-free offering, or your discounts on parking, or whatever it is you consider exciting news.

Sorry, Auckland Airport, but I’m not really interested in receiving marketing updates from you.Credit: iStock

This offer was made to me while I was logging on to the free Wi-Fi at New Zealand’s primary air hub. In order to do so you have to enter your email address, which is captured by the gaping, hungry maw of an internet marketing machine, which then wants to send you promotional material for the rest of your earthly life (and probably beyond).

I’ve checked the “no” box, though it doesn’t matter all that much since I’ve given a fake email address. To anyone who happens to own one of the weird and wild email addresses I’ve made up over the years, I apologise, because I’ve signed you up to a lot of mailing lists from some interesting – and some very boring – places around the globe over the years.

This is my secret weapon in the fight against having my inbox collapse under the weight of unsolicited marketing material: a fake email address.

As it is, I’ve had my real address captured enough times on my travels to have to devote a reasonable portion of my life to unsubscribing from things. There’s a hotel chain here, an airline there, a tour company over here, a shuttle bus company, a couple of restaurants, an aggregator or two, a booking engine or 15.

It’s no accident that Instagram is feeding you ads for products you feel like you only just discussed with your partner for the first time a few minutes ago.

In which plane of existence, you have to ask, am I going to care that the shuttle bus company I once used in Austria about 14 years ago has just added a new vehicle to its fleet? What could I possibly have to gain from the knowledge that a restaurant in Las Vegas I dined at a decade ago is announcing its new chef?

What is this world we’ve created, where every single company and entity you ever come into contact with demands your “details”?

I get text messages from Dick Smith on Black Friday. I haven’t shopped there in years. I get sales pitches from Trumpet of Patriots and I despise them with a passion and haven’t even supplied them my phone number.

It’s bad enough just existing in this world as a normal person. You can’t book a restaurant or buy a T-shirt without someone capturing your details. Bunnings wants your email address so it can send your receipt for a packet of nails. The Cotton On staff want to “just grab your email” as you attempt to get out of their store with a set of kids’ pyjamas.

But it’s worse for travellers. Far, far worse. Because you’re booking so much, you’re buying so much, you’re doing so many things. You fly, you drive, you eat, you tour, you stay, you purchase. You log on to the free Wi-Fi here, you use a voucher there.

Email address, phone number, email address, phone number, email address, phone number.

Who could possibly be interested in these things? How many customers actually act on these marketing pushes, rather than delete them immediately after being annoyed by them? Auckland Airport! No one chooses to go somewhere because of what the airport is doing. No one is going to be tempted to route their travel through Auckland because it has a parking discount for two weeks.

It feels like these companies are just doing this because they think they have to, because everyone else is, and the whole thing self-perpetuates. Capture details, put them on a mailing list.

If, however, the sale is in fact the object here, I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. Unless it’s just a pure numbers game, bare statistics, hoping to crack just 0.0001 per cent of the people it’s sent to, even if it annoys the hell out of everyone else.

There’s something else going on here too, because these emails and these text messages and these pop-up ads you receive are a brutal reminder that an online profile of you exists out there in the ether, and it knows you better than you know yourself. It knows your preferences, your predilections, your peccadillos.

It’s no accident that Instagram is feeding you ads for products you feel like you only just discussed with your partner for the first time a few minutes ago. It’s no surprise when that newsletter from the airline you travelled with a few years ago features the exact destinations you were just tossing up.

To travel now is to add to the online bank of information about you that already exists. It’s also to find yourself signed up to a whole heap of mailing lists for companies and products you really don’t care about, ad infinitum.

The fake email address will help. Unless you happen to own one of the email addresses I’ve made up.