All of us are frequently and routinely asked to provide our personal information to other people, organizations, and websites. Some of these requests arise from important or critical occasions in our lives: crossing a border into another country, registering to get married, or visiting a hospital for medical service. These are moments when we’re willing to provide our personal information to those who request it.

However, most requests for our personal information come from unimportant and noncritical sources: a nonprofit organization wants to contact you about a fundraiser, you sign up for an online cooking class, or you meet a reasonably cute human at a dive bar who wants your phone number. These are moments when we’re sometimes hesitant to provide our personal information to those who request it.

Despite our hesitation, we routinely provide the very same personal information to both critical and noncritical requests. We shouldn’t. Personal information is a top commodity in today’s digital world, and sharing it should be based on trust, not convenience.

As trust takes time to develop, we need a better strategy for how to navigate the world of information requests. Up until now, this series has focused on the digital efforts we can and should take to help secure our privacy and security online. Today, we’ll focus on combining common sense analog strategy with some really cool digital tools to help categorize, limit, or restrict access to our personal information.

Setting Categories, Evaluating Requests, and Sharing Different Data

Classifying our personal data is a three-step process.

Step 1: Establish Different Categories of Requests

Earlier, I broke down examples of requests into either “important/critical” or “unimportant/noncritical.” Feel free to use your own categories, of course. The names you choose aren’t important; establishing different categories is.

Is this REALLY an important request for your personal data?

Step 2: Evaluate Each Request for Your Personal Data

For the next week, here’s a fun assignment: simply observe every request you receive for your personal information. You’ll notice that some requests are less important than others. For example, you might be asked to provide your email address to save 15% on a future purchase. This isn’t a “critical” request: it’s a marketing technique to hand over your personal information.

Step 3: Create and Have Easy Access to Multiple Kinds of Personal Data That You Can Share

If you routinely get requests for personal data from both critical and noncritical sources, then you’ll need different data to provide for each of those requests. I never give out my actual cellphone number or email address to strangers, new friends, or organizations. Instead, I provide those people with my secondary data. They can still reach me, of course, but never in a way that will bother or spam me.

Obtaining secondary data to give to different people is 100 percent legal, 100 percent easy, and — I believe — 100 percent necessary in today’s digital world to guard our privacy. So let’s jump headfirst into living the Classified Life, everyone! We’ll start with our old friend: email.

Get Secondary Email Addresses

When I say “old friend,” I mean it: Email was born in the mid-1960s, before the advent of internet, making the technology more than 50 years old. The fact that most of us continue to lean so heavily on email as it was originally designed is nothing short of miraculous—and, frankly, questionable. Instead, we should use email the same way we use snail mail: by using different addresses.

When I’m sending holiday cards to family and friends, I place my home address on the envelope but when I’m writing about business-related matters, I place my business address on the envelope instead. My email strategy is no different: I write about technology on Medium, I’ve authored a funny book on “cutting the cord,” and I’m the artistic director of a well-reviewed theater troupe in Los Angeles. I use a different email address for each of those roles. This way, I can better sort my email.

However — and this is important — I also maintain a number of “burner” email addresses: These are the addresses I provide to any unimportant website, organization, or individual that demands my email for one reason or another. In fact, here’s one of those burner email addresses I regularly hand out: “sputch@mailnesia.com.”

Why would I share this with you publically? Because I never check this account. Mailnesia’s two best features are (1) auto-confirming any email verification links that are sent to it, and (2) auto-deleting all emails within three to five days. In truth, Mailnesia is a service that’s designed to catch the spam and crap I never want to see in my important email inboxes. Just look at all the random crap that’s in my inbox right now. I mean that literally: click this link and log in to the actual account yourself. You can do that because burner email accounts aren’t protected with passwords. If you’re worried about my security, don’t be — the emails that go to this account aren’t a security matter. It’s an address that’s meant only to receive unimportant or trash emails I don’t need or want.

There are a ton of great free services like Mailnesia that provide similar functionality: Maildrop, GuerillaMail, and FakeMailGenerator, to name but a few. Each service provides a similar set of features, including:

The ability to register your burner email with most any website.

Ease of use, including no passwords to remember.

Auto-confirmation of any email verification requests it receives.

An inbox that holds a limited number of emails, say 10 to 20.

An inbox that auto-deletes messages that are left unread for a certain period of time, usually from 10 minutes to five days.

Spam filtering, to check all incoming emails against a centrally managed list of known offenders.

The ability to create many burner email addresses at the same site.

It’s worth noting that some websites that require an email address for verification actively block some of these burner email sites. If that happens, try a few of the websites I’ve listed. You’ll eventually find one that works.