California and New Jersey have laws that go above and beyond the protections outlined in CAN-SPAM. I used to work for a company that sent spam (I swear, I didn'

California and New Jersey have laws that go above and beyond the protections outlined in CAN-SPAM. I used to work for a company that sent spam (I swear, I didn't know until after I'd already accepted the job), and we avoided sending to those states. If more states would adopt laws like this, we could dramatically curtail spam. As for what constitutes solicitation, I wish it was that simple. In some instances, companies will buy your email address from another company, and they believe that constitutes consent. In other words, you did business with Company Foo, and I did business with Company Foo, so you consented to do business with me. It's insane. Having been inside one of these businesses, I have three pieces of advice. First: Mark spam emails as spam when you see them. You only have to get a few of your messages marked as spam to get your IP address blacklisted. You have far more power over spammers than you think. Not only that, but spammers fear this so much that they keep databases of complainers, and they'll leave you alone in the future. Sometimes they'll even share lists of complainers with other companies so they won't risk your wrath. Spam companies love non-complainers. Even if you don't open the spam, not complaining helps their numbers with the email provider. By not complaining, you're sending a signal to your email provider that this is a good email, and other users would like to receive it. Not only that, they'll remember you as a person who can be relied upon to not complain, so you'll get more spam than other people. Second: Read EULAs. We did business with some super-shady companies who sold us tons of really invasive user info. One company even sold us the contents of people's email. Not just meta data, we could actually read the content. They don't mention any of this on their site, but it's subtly stated in the EULA. Read them and check for references to sharing your data with business partners. I've steered clear of some browsers and email clients as a result of vague EULAs that leave the potential for harvesting my data and selling it. Third: This one is going to be unpopular on Hackernews, but the best way to avoid being fingerprinted by advertisers is to block JavaScript by default. There are bajillions of ways to uniquely identify your computer, right down to having your browser report which fonts you have installed. Almost every single technique relies on Flash, Java, or JavaScript. Ad-blockers help, but they don't catch everything. I use NoScript to turn off JavaScript by default, and I only enable a site if it seems legitimate and the site is broken without it. Here's a terrifying list of the things advertisers can do to uniquely identify you without consent and without a cookie. As the article says, disabling JavaScript by default is by far the most effective method for protecting yourself from fingerprinting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fingerprinting https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fingerprinting It's a little inconvenient, but good security always is. The locks on your front door are inconvenient (what if you lose your key?), but hopefully they're even more inconvenient for would-be intruders.