The best spam email blocker is not getting spammed in the first place. Here’s how to prevent spam email (or at least reduce the amount of spam you are getting) by removing your personal information from the Internet. You may already know this, but here in the United States, where the privacy laws are so lax, it’s perfectly legal for a company to scrape all of your contact information and then sell access to it. ZoomInfo, Spokeo, Crunchbase, Apollo.io, and RocketReach all do this, as do many others. And removing your data from those databases can help to reduce the amount of spam email that you receive. We’re going to tell you how to remove yourself from these top 5 sites, and then we’re going to tell you about a service that will remove you from all the sites (more than 500 of them), if you want to go in that direction.

A massive security breach at T-Mobile has exposed the personal private data of nearly 50million T-Mobile customers and prospects, including social security numbers and drivers license numbers. And it doesn’t matter whether you are a current, past, or even prospective customer of T-Mobile, your data has been compromised. By “prospective” we mean someone who has applied for an account with T-Mobile even if they never actually signed up. And that is because the T-Mobile data breach includes those social security numbers which are, of course, required for just about every service that is going to extend credit to you.

With little national fanfare, Vermont’s new data brokering law – requiring businesses which buy and sell your personal data to register and disclose to the state of Vermont that they are a data broker – went into effect a few weeks ago.

A couple of weeks back, the hacker group Rex Mundi blackmailed AmeriCash Advance, demanding that the payday lender give the group around $20,000. If AmeriCash Advance didn’t pay up, Rex Mundi would publish the thousands of loan-applicant records it stole from the payday lender. Now, a couple of weeks later, AmeriCash Advance hasn’t paid the extortion fee, so Rex Mundi did in fact publish all those loan-applicant records. This is a newsworthy story in its own right, but what really makes it important is that it reveals how utterly unsecured so much of our private information (Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, banking data, etc.) is. And our private information and other data are not just vulnerable to skilled hackers – it’s vulnerable in general because it is often so poorly protected.

At this point, most of us know that Facebook collects an enormous amount of personal information about its users. Facebook relentlessly absorbs data – unfathomable amounts of data – that it saves and then uses for various purposes, like targeted advertising. But what kind of personal information does Facebook collect? How much personal information does Facebook have about you? What, in short, does Facebook know about you?