You don't need to give them your own, accurate data though.
I have an old hotmail email address that I haven't looked at for years and I'm not sure it even works and I used that. It doesn't even have my real name or initials.
I can't remember what other information they ask for but they don't know if what you put is true or not and so this is true for just about any form you need to fill in:
You can say anything is your mother's maiden name as long as you can remember it.
You don't have to give your real date of birth. Interesting sometimes to see when you get congratulations from other sources on the date you've given and you then know who has sold their contacts list.
For telephone numbers, all 0000 usually works but otherwise pick something public like a local post office and you can use their postcode too.
For the BBC I seem to remember I used their SW1 postcode and one of their contact phone numbers.
Etc, etc you get the idea.
Sometimes, you have to give an active email because it must be verified but you can still have one that isn't in your real name and you keep it just for that purpose. I find one that is just numbers gets less spam and anyway, when you get a message beginning, 'Hello Mr. 1234' then you know you can bin it.
It's very liberating and quite good fun to realise you don't have to tell the truth and they don't know.
On one site I put my address as Rue de Ramarques and my first boss as Me Mum.
(N.B. - Hey
@Ruggy, you didn’t write your reply outside of the quote tag of my post you quoted, so it's largely hidden, you might want to edit or people won’t see all your response, as it gets truncated as a long quote.)
All good advice, you are preaching to the converted

- like I said I did similar but lots of people won’t, or won’t even think to... but the fact we can give them duff info just underlines the pointlessness of the whole thing being imposed. From my point of view there was no good reason to force it in the first place. As with many situations like this, if the advantages are so real people with choose to sign up, unnecessarily forcing it just raises my hackles and makes me feel it’s much more nefarious. Which I actually think it is.
I understand what you're saying. My point was general unwarranted moaning about the BBC. Your point is a valid one, however it isn't just the BBC doing that. It's exactly what commercial rivals throughout the tech industry are doing 24/7. Are you saying Netflix and Amazon Prime don't track what we watch? Of course they do!
I'm not saying that I agree with it, however this isn't something that's unique to the BBC.
Yes but the point is that the BBC isn’t supposed to act just like commercial rivals. They have a responsibility to offer an alternative that isn’t just aping the likes of Netflix, Amazon etc., because of the Royal Charter and licence fee.
If they want to give those up, then they can do what they want. But while being able to receive their free-to-air broadcasts requires what is essentially a form of taxation (which I agree is good value for the programming they provide) they have a privileged position that comes with different expectations and responsibilities than purely commercial companies.
And to me, part of those responsibilities should be not putting obstacles in the way of accessibility, and not slurping up user data for little to no benefit, and certainly not without a way to bypass that for people who have no interest in participating in the company’s personalisation, tracking etc, or the added hassle of sign-ins.
The idea of voice control could even be a good thing for some people - but with their recent approaches to things I just have no confidence it will be done in a good way for only the right reasons. It just feels like they are chasing some ‘cool’ tech because they can, and for frankly shady reasons that benefit them more than users, yet again.
They want to be a publicly-funded organisation yet behave like all the other commercial ones. That is the root issue I have with them. They should pick one, and deal with the consequences and advantages of the choice. Have cake or eat it, stop trying to do both.