With the abundance of free samples, magazines, and coupons available to sign up for online these days, many people are concerned about protecting their personal information. And, you should be! While there are many legitimate freebies, there are some that are just schemes to get your information.
I wanted to give you some tips to help protect your personal information when signing up for freebies online. Here they are!
1. Don’t use your primary email address.
Almost all free samples will require a valid email address. There’s no need to risk filling up your regular email inbox with spam or newsletters from 50 different companies that you’ve requested freebies from. Set up a free email account at Gmail or Yahoo and reserve it specifically for “junk mail” use.
Note that some requests do require that you click on a link in an email to confirm that you requested the sample, so you do want to use a valid email address that you have access to.
2. Don’t give out your phone number.
Once upon a time, you could use a free voicemail service to have a valid phone number to give out without having to worry about actually receiving calls on it. Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any services like this today – some offer “free” trials, but you have to enter your credit card information and then remember to cancel your account before the free trial starts.
I don’t have a solution to this, unfortunately. I don’t recommend giving out a “fake” number, because the number that is “fake” to you may be very real to someone else!
Personally, if an offer asks for a phone number and I am not 100% confident of the company’s ethical practices, I will probably skip it.
3. Don’t give out your birth date.
Now, personally, I don’t have a problem giving out my birthdate to a reputable company. There are now laws in place that require companies to verify your age before they send you a freebie, so most sites have to ask at least the year of birth. But, if in doubt, consider changing the month and day.
I don’t recommend doing this when you’re signing up for birthday freebies from legitimate sites. If you receive a birthday coupon good on your birthday, which you stated was December 13th, you take it to the restaurant to redeem, and they ask for ID and find out your birthday is in July, well, that’s just not a good idea. But be smart about who you’re giving your birthday to!
4. Don’t ever give out your credit card number, driver’s license number, or Social Security number.
If you’re requesting a freebie and they ask for any personal information like this, click away. No one needs your Social Security number to send you a free granola bar!
I urge similar caution with giving out your credit card information, though occasionally there may be free trials of websites that do require you to submit your credit card to start the trial. If you are ever unclear as to what you are receiving, or what the terms are of the free trial, do not give out your credit card information.
5. Be savvy – if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
If you click on a banner ad that promises you a laptop, new cell phone, or gift card… It’s probably spam. Be smart about what you’re doing. I said it once, but it bears repeating - if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
I hope these tips are helpful! Please leave a comment if you have any other questions you’d like me to try to answer, and if you have any other tips, please share!
Of course, my promise to you is that I make every attempt to promote only legitimate freebies on this site, but please make sure you are being savvy about any offer that you click on that takes you to another site.
Thanks for this post. You have said before to create a “junk mail” email address, and I haven’t done it, but judging by the state of my primary email inbox, I really need to. Do you just use the junk email for freebies, or also to sign up for websites like betty crocker and eatbetteramerica.com?
Just depends. I usually use my “real” address for sites like that, because I do want to see the updates (they sometimes contain links to printable coupons). But, I think the key is to be savvy about who will spam you and who won’t. Usually, big-name companies won’t, and if you get tired of their updates you can easily unsubscribe. (It’s a law that you must have an unsubscribe link when you send out bulk emails.)
I haven’t tried this myself, but I just saw a reference to it as a “disposable” phone number generator – http://www.inumbr.com/
It actually forwards calls to your number, and you can set it to delete the number in a certain timeframe. It might be a solution!
I use google voice for all my non-”real” phone stuff. You get a real phone number and specify what number you want google voice calls to forward to (home, cell, etc.) You can screen calls, block numbers, etc. for free. Also, you can change a setting to where the caller id shows the true number or your google voice number. So, whenever my cell phone shows an incoming call from “Google Voice,” I don’t answer it.
Lauren, I’d thought about this, but wasn’t sure I wanted to use my Google Voice number for junk since I might want to use it for real someday. I hadn’t thought about the fact that you could block numbers, though. I might have to check it out!
Yeah, I’ve gotten some random calls on there. I’ve googled the number and found people saying it was someone telling you you’ve won $1mil. Blocked for sure! :)
Be aware of Free offers that don’t post the “Terms and Conditions” up front. If you don’t see them, hunt for them and read them. Often the opportunity to sign up for the offer will be at the top of the web page; be sure to scroll all the way down to see if Terms and Conditions are listed there. Also be aware of the term “Free Trial” since “trial” indicates that eventually if you don’t return the item, you’ll get charged full price and will be signed up for monthly shipments.