Amazon Sidewalk automatically uses a bit of your wireless network to create a mesh network with nearby Alexa and Ring devices. Amazon is enabling it automatically for all devices (old and new), so you have to disable it if you won’t want your neighbors’ Amazon devices using your wireless network.

The nettersphere is a’twitter with chatter about Amazon’s new free sample program, and people are wondering both how to get free samples on Amazon, and also how to stop getting free samples if you don’t want them. Here’s everything that you need to know.

If you have ever been on the receiving end of an Evite invitation, you know that once your ‘friend’ gives your email address to Evite (almost always without asking you first) you will receive an endless stream of spam (it’s spam because you did not request it, let along give them permission to put your email address on their mailing list) from Evite, seemingly with no way to opt out of it (making it a violation of Federal law, but apparently Evite doesn’t care about that). Here is out to opt out of Evite notifications and other Evite spam.

Wondering how to opt-out of LinkedIn Sponsored Inmail (which we here refer to as LinkedIn spam)? When you get unwanted LinkedIn InMail email from an individual, you can hit “report as spam” on it. But when you get a sponsored message, you don’t have that option (because, of course, LinkedIn has sold that access to your LinkedIn inbox to whomever sent you that message).

While the new Kindle Lending program may be good news to a lot of people, not everybody loves it. In particular, if you are an author or publisher whose book is carried on Amazon in Kindle format, you may not want people sharing your copyrighted material freely with others. If that describes you, here’s how to opt out of Kindle lending of your book.

LinkedIn has ramped up their promotional message program – also known as sponsored messages (or as some call it, LinkedIn spam). Promotional messages, explains LinkedIn, are “from a marketing or hiring partner and was sent to you based on your browsing activity or non-personal information such as job title, primary industry, or region.” Here’s how to make it stop.

Now here’s a novel idea: how about if your Internet service (ISP), telecom, or broadband provider had to get your permission before they could sell your information and data to third-parties? That’s just what FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is proposing (full text of proposal below). What, you thought it was already that way? Think again, and the Internet, broadband and telecom providers are fighting it.

Sick of the ads by Adblade on your iPhone, Android device, or on websites on your computer? You’re not alone. In fact, we get a lot of people searching for how to remove ads by Adblade. Here is how to opt-out of advertising by Adblade, and block ads by Adblade.

With Google’s announcement that businesses can now upload your email address to Google so that they can target advertising to you even more, a lot of you have been asking us “how do I stop Google ads from following me?” Here’s how to stop Google ads from following you around the Internet.

Behavioral advertising, also known as behavioral targeting or behavioral marketing, is when an advertiser or advertising server hooks into the data that is stored by your browser or app, to serve you interested based ads. These things tell the advertisers and networks things such as what searches you recently conducted, what sites you visited, etc.. Behavioral advertising is increasingly being used by advertisers and their publishers (Facebook just announced they are using behavioral advertising), and consumers are becoming increasingly concerned for their privacy. So how can you opt-out of behavioral advertising?

Imagine our surprise to discover that such a large, established organization as Priceline has omitted a little thing like an unsubscribe link from some of their mailings. The main Federal anti-spam law, CAN-SPAM, requires that, among other things, when a business puts you on their mailing list, they must include a link allowing you to easily opt-out, in every mailing. Priceline, however, provides no unsubscribe link, at least in some of their mailings. While we are sure that this is just an oversight on Priceline’s part, it nonetheless can be very frustrating for the Priceline mailing recipient who wishes to opt out of Priceline’s mailings.

Facebook has been in the news quite a bit lately (stay tuned for our upcoming story on the woman who was arrested for poking someone on Facebook!), and there is increasing awareness over just how intrusive and invading of their users’ privacy many of their money-making practices are, such as using their users (you and your Facebook friends) in their Facebook advertising. Here’s a real-life example of someone being used in Facebook ads, and information on how to opt out and stop Facebook from doing it to you.