Is it safe to give out my email address?

If this was a yes/no question then the answer would simply be "No".

In life, most things aren't simply answered as a yes/no and protecting your email address privacy is one of them.

DANGERS

Why have safety concerns when giving out my email address? It's a good question and to start us off, here's a short list of what could eventually happen when giving out your email address:

* Identify theft
* Fraud
* Loss of money
* Increase in SPAM
* Loss of individual privacy

We'll come back to each of the above and how giving out your email address could lead to them.

CONSIDERING SAFETY

When considering safety when giving out your email address, we can look at the general answers and issues as well as the case-by-case answers and issues.

GENERAL CASES

In general, when you are dealing with companies such as banks, utility bills (think electric, water and garbage), credit cards, investments, mortgages and other companies that deal with your assets, giving out your email should be safe.

When you think about it, you already trust these institutions with your money and other assets, if you trust them with those, you should be able to trust them with your email address. Also, these companies have things you need access to, so it's important that you have given them your email address so that you can verify things or be alerted of important issues or alerts that you need to give immediate attention too.

Is it safe to give out your email address to family and friends? Yes. Why? Well the reality is you should be have a network of people that you can depend on and that wouldn't do you wrong.

Most likely your friends and family won't be selling your email address and trying to commit identity theft as you. Let's hope!

CASE-BY-CASE

So how to decide when it's safe to give your email address out to other companies and people that ask? You'll need to consider them case-by-case.

It's very important to understand that you are not required to give out your email address to use the internet. These days, it seems that web sites require you to give them an email address just to view their products or articles.

So the first question to ask when giving out your email address is, Do I trust this person or web site? If no, then don't give it to them.

If Yes, next ask, does this web site need my email address since it's the only way to identify me and it offers me something that I will want to access at a later date? If no, don't give it to them.

So what do you do when you want to proceed on a web site or receive an email and you answered "no" to one of the questions above?

SOLUTION

Simple, get a temporary email address at EmailOnDeck.com.

By using a temporary email address, you lose the risk to the dangers first mentioned, you get to evaluate these new companies or web sites that you don't necessarily trust yet and you can proceed to access what you were looking for.

A temp email address can protect you from identity theft because your identity is not being given to anyone. There's no identity to be stolen!

A temporary/disposable email address protects you from fraud because the email address isn't associated with you and therefore you can not be associated with any false fraud claims.

A disposable email address can protect you from loss of money and SPAM because many people are swindled out of their money when the receive phishing emails from SPAM. These emails are designed to look like they are from an official company (e.g. PayPal) but are actually from someone looking to steal your login and password.

And finally a disposable/throw away email address helps protect you from loss of online privacy by giving "Data collecting companies" no useful information on you. They aren't collecting data about what sites you visit, what newsletters or sites you sign up for because the throw away email address you use via EmailOnDeck doesn't have any information tied to you.

CONCLUSION

We hope this gives you a better understanding on how to answer the question: Is it safe to give out my email address? Ultimately, it's about being smart on who you're giving it to and for what purpose.

Stay safe out there.