With the holidays upon us junk mail is at it’s peak circulation and leaves us all vulnerable to identity theft. I get dozens of credit card offers, local circulars, and product newsletters each week – both at home and at work. I found a website called ProQuo that aims to put the consumer back in control of their information. I signed up a few weeks ago for their beta and, to be honest, haven’t seen much of a difference as yet. However, I’m keeping at it because they say it takes between 4 weeks and 3 months to see a drastic reduction, especially for snail mail publications.
The service is free and they will make money by allowing consumers to opt-in to specific offers in addition to opting-out. This is the best site I have seen thus far to offer centralization of opt-out notices. It has a clean interface and is very user-friendly. The only downside is that many of the marketing companies still require written notice for name removal, so it can be time consuming to write letters to the 5 or so companies who haven’t made it to the internet age. I guess that’s how they get you though – make it so difficult to unsubscribe and people will just leave it be. To combat this, ProQuo has developed templates for the letters, but it can still be time consuming. Try it yourself and let me know how it goes.
