Is it safe to give your address when you sign up for free stuff?

mtbaird

Gawd
Joined
Dec 12, 2003
Messages
677
i never give my normal email becasue of spam fears. is there anything wrong with giving your address and phone number? obviously you cant get the free thing withoguth your address, but will they send a bunch of junk mail or anything?
 
mtbaird said:
...will they send a bunch of junk mail or anything?

Yes, they'll definitely start sending you junk mail and probably sell your address off to other junk mail marketing companies. There's really no way to avoid it unless you use a PO Box and change it regularly. Then again, many companies will not accept PO Box addresses for shipping.
 
I use my middle name for all free magazines, condoms ( :D ) etc.

Then if I ever get an envelope addressed to my middle name, I quickly feel it to see if a surprise is inside, if not, I don't even open it and just trash it.
 
imagine how much junk snail mail we'd get if they didn't have to pay postage

The mail carriers would have to be gorillas imported from africa :eek:
 
You can always sign up for stuff with a spamgourmet.com account if you don't want email spam, not much you can do about snail mail spam though. Spamgourmet gives you free forwarding addresses that you can give to a place and it will only forward as many emails as you tell it to, which is useful for the ones that require confirmation.
 
Read the agreement and sign up according to how much you want the object / how much you hate spam mail.

The free SuSE from Novell is a good example of a company that in the agreement, says it will not give your information to any third parties.
Now if you signed up for a fictious mouse pad giveaway from Disney, you may be screwed, even with a "no tirhd party agreement" since they own everything. Nothing is third party to them (well almost nothing).
 
I just use a junk hotmail account to sign up for everything and i use my address at school so i'm not worried about any kind of junk being sent there. when i graduate maybe someone else will get it :)
 
I sign up with a hotmail email addy - its spam filter is on max, and that takes care of the email spam. As far as junk mail, all it takes is a pitch into the trash, and its gone
 
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