Dear Concerned Consumer,

The portals - major sites designed to be entry pages to the Web - have begun to offer "personalized services." To use these services - ("My Yahoo," "My Excite," etc. ) - the sites ask you for a lot of personal information. These personalized sites offer to provide you only information that fits your interests, but in the process you may be turning over information that could be sold to others and used in any number of other ways. For example, if you keep a personal calendar on paper or on your home computer, anyone, even the government, would have to come to you if they wanted to read it. Online, however, this same information could be used by the business who is holding it; sold to other companies; turned over to the government; or even just given to a lawyer who subpoenas it without your knowledge and consent.

Most of the portals offer you the ability to give as much or as little personal information as you would like and some offer the ability to opt-out of the sale of this information to other companies. We recommend that you read over the privacy policy of the portal that you use and take a look at the information that you are providing them. You should try to limit the amount of personal information that you turn over to the amount you believe is necessary to get the service that you desire, often this is no information at all. Also, look to see if the company says that the information is being shared with other businesses - often called "trusted parties" or "advertisers or business partners." If so, you can probably opt-out of this data sharing.

We have provided you with a list of portals on the left. If you use one of these portals, you can find their policy and exercise your ability to stop them from sharing your data. If your portal is not on this list or if you find others to add, please send them on to us - suggestions@opt-out.cdt.org.

Check back because this list will expand as new opt-outs are sent in. If you find sites that do not allow you to opt-out online, write to them and ask why they don't!