So I found a solution and it is to accept the coupon offer (or whatever it is) pop-up that appears when you first load the front page- this takes you to another page and everything including login works OK from there. Thanks for the tips.
I thing good privacy and security things are people-compiled (and updated) hosts files such as someonewhocares.org/hosts, and app firewalls. TinyWall on windoze, HandsOff on Mac and NoRoot Firewall on android. These will simply block internet acces for all apps on your machine except the apps (and even system processes if you want) you explicitly allow. I cannot conceive of going online without at least one of these filters. I do go overboard with privacy plugins on Firefox sometimes. Most commercial sites don't work with some of those.
Pretty sure they hand stuff over to the US gov whenever asked so another win for Android.
Another win? Haha well that depends, does google, whose services part of most android phones, not hand over this data? From a quick search it does seem that Apple complies with relatively more requests, but it's not like Android scores a win when it's not that far behind. Oh well, it's an os for a phone so who cares
As fas as i can see google IS the US gov/ CIA/ NSA etc behind a corporate facade. Where else would google have gotten the resoures and the political power to do what they have done? (photograph entire cities and essentially capture the internet). Android is supposed to be open source but unless you are geeky enough to root your phone and know how to secure it, it's still loaded with google spyware on most phones.
It could become a rather serious problem once you need a phone to exist in society.