2. Take yourself off marketers' lists. DMAchoice.org, run by the trade association that represents direct marketers, promises to help remove you from the mailing lists maintained by the association's members. Basically, you'll be added to a "suppression list" that's provided to members to check against their mailing lists. Not every marketer participates in this program, but enough do that "it should reduce about 80% of the unwanted mail," said Senny Boone, the Direct Marketing Association's senior vice present for corporate and social responsibility.
Just ignore the website's advice about how you should "ideally" go about deleting yourself from marketing lists. It wants you to contact its hundreds of members individually. That way madness lies. Instead, use the button that allows you to unsubscribe from everything in each category: catalog offers, magazine offers and "other mail" offers. (The "credit offers" button takes you to OptOutPrescreen.com.)
3. Consider signing up with Catalog Choice. Once you buy a product from a retailer, chances are good you'll start getting its catalog, whether you're on a suppression list of not. Catalog Choice not only helps you get off those for free, but it also offers a $20-a-year MailStop Shield service that plucks your information out of several of the big databases, so it can't be sold to marketers. The company also has an iPhone application that makes getting off mailing lists relatively easy: You take a picture of the junk mail and send it in.
Catalog Choice has been a nonprofit since its inception a few years ago, although it's just been sold to TrustedID, an identity-theft protection company.
4. Pay attention to opt-out notices. Financial companies are required to send these once a year. The notices describe, in dry legalese, how the company collects and shares your information, and gives you a (usually cramped, sometimes tiny) form to fill out if you don't want your information shared. You're supposed to have to do this only once, despite the annual mailings.
5. Give anonymously. One big source of junk mail is solicitations for charitable contributions. Many nonprofits sell or trade donor information. You can opt out charity by charity, or you can give through a site such as Network for Good, which allows you to donate to any charity you choose without revealing your name, address or other details to that charity. Network for Good promises that it will use the information you provide only to make your donation and that it "will never sell, trade or rent your personal information to other individuals or companies."
6. Read privacy policies. What a snooze, right? Except you'll quickly find out which companies are sharing your information and which promise not to. Macy's privacy policy, for example, lists the many types of information it collects from customers (names, street addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, birth dates, items purchased and information associated with the use of its website) and tells you the company "may share your information with third parties so that they can directly market their products or services to you if we feel that these products or services may be of interest to you."
Nordstrom, by contrast, "does not share customer information (including email addresses) outside the Nordstrom family of companies unless it is necessary to provide you with products or services available from Nordstrom. We may also disclose information when you tell us to do so, to identify or contact you, to protect your rights or the rights of Nordstrom or as required by law."
That doesn't mean you should stop shopping at Macy's. But if you don't want your information shared, you'll need to proactively opt out. You can do so by calling Macy's at 888-529-2254.
7. Support legislation that would give you some rights. The Direct Marketing Association believes self-regulation is working just fine, but consumer and privacy-rights advocates disagree. Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and John McCain, R-Ariz., have introduced a Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act that says, among other things, that companies should have clear privacy policies and offer a way for consumers to opt out of information sharing. President Barack Obama's proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights is another effort to give people some say in how their information is used. If you want some choice in the matter, let your lawmakers know.
Liz Weston is the Web's most-read personal-finance writer. She is the author of several books, most recently "The 10 Commandments of Money: Survive and Thrive in the New Economy" (find it on Bing). Weston's award-winning columns appear every Monday and Thursday, exclusively on MSN Money. Join the conversation and send in your financial questions on Liz Weston's Facebook fan page.
