Take One Hour to Take Five Steps to Protect Your Privacy

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What can you easily do to protect your privacy? Chris Hoofnagel, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center recommends the following five steps to opt out of certain information sharing. They take about an hour, but make a big difference.

1. Call the credit reporting number and opt-out of prescreening: 1-888-5-OPTOUT or visit OptOutPrescreen.com. This will also opt out of "mortgage triggers."

2. Call your phone companies and opt-out of "CPNI" sharing.

3. Call your banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses to opt-out under *both* the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (sometimes there is no option to opt-out of FCRA, but you can almost always opt-out under GLBA). Note that this isn’t necessary with CCU as they don’t sell member information.

4. Call the FTC do-not-call database, and opt-out of telemarketing.
1-888-382-1222; for TTY, call 1-866-290-4236.

5. Go to junkbusters.com, and do "Junkbusters Declare."

These five steps will take about an hour. But the reduction in marketing will be significant! Opting out of prescreening alone will stop 90% of those unsolicited credit card offers.

For more information, here's a blog entry from consumer reporter Caroline Mayer on Opting Out of Unsolicited Credit Card Offers.

This handout for Remar Sutton's Privacy seminars was prepared by Remar Sutton, CCU's StraightTalk spokesperson & Remar Sutton & Associates, for Corning StraightTalk, October 2006. All rights reserved.