In my travels in the course of business I meet with many folks who are bedeviled almost to distraction by the importunities of telemarketing, spam and junkmail showing up in their telephones, email inboxes and U.S. mailboxes.
So, therefore, I am happy to write that we in our little house in Kirkland are very blissfully ignorant of any such intrusions and if you wish to be thus blissful as well it’s very easy to do so.
But please, any gentle readers active in the above industries may wish to skip this letter and go on to read the classified ads or the police blotter instead as this may be stressful. You could try putting on a little of your favorite soft music if it helps to get through this, though.
Now first, open a browser and Google the direct marketing association and visit their website online, which is our consumers’ window into the direct marketing world and quickly and easily build a filter of your names and addresses on the Direct Memory Access system to block the data miners of the public record from seeing you wherever you may appear in the public record at any level of government in the country, even including the public record of all 50 states and the territories.
Why? Because the vital record and public record is sold by the public entities to the direct marketing industry all the time for money.
However, please be charitable to the King County recorder as they do not upload the scanned images of mortgage borrowers’ legal instruments onto the KC recorder’s website.
That means that web surfers out there looking for signatures, loan amounts and personal addresses can’t see anything but a tile reading, “image not viewable.” So, thank you KC recorders’ office, it’s much appreciated by all!
Second, there is a spam blocker I found called mailwasher.com that has hosed the spam in my oldest email account from dozens a day to several at most and I’m a total IT klutz, but it works blissfully for me. I’m told it sits on your computer and pings the spammers back or something that your IP address doesn’t exist so don’t even try yours anymore.
Three, visit all three credit bureaus’ home pages, Transunion.com, Equifax.com and Experian.com.
Open a browser and Google the three credit bureaus and visit their home pages.
Why? Because every single time you have ever been an applicant for credit you sign an authorization to release your private information, which your creditor sends off to the credit bureaus in order to get a look at your credit.
Never opted out with the credit bureaus? Go to their websites’ search windows and type in “privacy.” Do it now and prevent the data miners from buying the guts of your credit report without your even knowing that it’s happening and stop what I’m told are called “soft hits” dinging down your credit scores as the credit bureaus sell your report to the data miners. More bliss!
Don’t forget the “do not call” registry, which you can Google on your browser. Do it now for home numbers and especially cell numbers as those became public only a few months ago. The federal government website reads that once registered that this is good forever, but I beg to differ.
Fifth, visit your revolving monthly creditors online such as mortgage, boat, furniture, car, or home improvement lender, and department store card and credit card issuer and any financial corporation to whom you owe money and go to their search window and type in “privacy,” “choice,” or “opt out” and follow any prompts to prevent your private information from being data mined internally.
Always respond back to the first privacy policy form you receive as that is your creditor offering you your privacy back. What! You’ve been throwing those away without reading them? It could be stuffed in the back of an envelope bearing the offers of financial, investment, retirement and insurance products.
So there you have it. I encourage anyone who has read thus far without steam coming out of their ears to copy/paste this onto your computer to save it for future reference. Heck, send this page of the paper to people for whom you care very much so that they might share, too!
But, sorry, spammers and data miners. Sorry, telemarketers and private investigators. Sorry, commercial fundraisers and web surfers. And sorry, U.S. Postal Service, too.
Perhaps the postal service is a dinosaur depending on outdated sources of sustenance like junk mail and may go extinct in time just as the dinosaurs did, including even the oldest and wisest of the dinosaurs among them. In our little house in Kirkland on our home phone we typically hear from the charities that we donate to, friends, family and the occasional stray wrong number. We don’t have a shredder, don’t pay for credit monitoring, don’t have call blocking, nor do we have phone numbers popping up on the big screen TV. Ah, bliss!
Miles F. Holden, Kirkland
