"Decline" and half the site breaks; "opt out" rarely deletes anything and just flags you as evasive. The move isn't to refuse — it's to give them exactly what they demand, fabricated. Feed the machine a decoy. You keep full functionality; your real self stays fully private. Use their system against them.
1. Never the real one. When a form, cookie wall, loyalty program, or sign‑up demands your info, don't decline and don't give the truth — paste a decoy.
2. Same site → same decoy. Reuse one persona per site so logins and carts keep working. Different site → different decoy so no one can stitch your profile together across the web.
3. Route the email. Use an alias so confirmations still reach you while your real inbox stays hidden (see below).
4. Poison the well. The more junk in their database, the less your real data is worth — to them, and to the brokers they sell it to.
A decoy email only works if you can still get the confirmation. Don't use your real inbox — use an alias that forwards to you and can be killed the moment it starts getting spam. Best options:
Unlimited random @icloud aliases that forward to you. Built into iPhone/Mac sign‑up.
How ↗Free email masks (and phone masks, paid) that forward to your real address.
relay.firefox.com ↗@duck.com aliases that also strip trackers out of the forwarded mail.
duckduckgo.com/email ↗Open‑source alias services — one alias per site, disable any that leak.
simplelogin.io ↗Gmail/iCloud ignore anything after a +: you+store@gmail.com still reaches you — and you can see who leaked it. Weak (easily stripped) but free.
Use in a decoy