By entering sweepstakes, you are giving out your information. With so much internet crime and skilled hackers being able to pull information from your computer, it is always essential to be as careful as possible. For this reason as well as general safety concerns, you may consider creating another identity of sorts just for sweepstaking.
Email
The very first thing I would recommend is creating an email account just for contests. The biggest reason for this is junk mail. If you start entering contests, you must be prepared to get junk mail. Companies don't sponsor sweepstakes out of the goodness of their heart. It is a great way for them to generate a client base. Thus, it is commonplace to have to sign up for or automatically get signed up for email newsletters and the like. I don't get a lot of physical junk mail, believe it or not. Paper ads are expensive but email is free. Most companies are going to opt to send you a free email than spend the money on glossy ads and post to send it via postal mail.
It is important to keep up with your Sweepstaking email account though. I get somewhere around 60 emails a day, most of it junk. If I didn't check it regularly, it would build up considerably. Periodically, I go through and unsubscribe myself from e-newsletters to de-clutter my inbox and reduce the amount of junk mail I receive.
Most of my winning notifications have come via email. with so much junk mail, it could be easy to skim right over a winning mail. Thus, it is important to look through your emails and not just delete them. Once your eye is trained on what to specifically look for, it becomes a lot easier to scan your emails quickly and decipher what is junk and what is a win!
Phone
I don't like giving out my cell number because the last thing I need is telemarketers calling me. to combat this issue, I signed up for Google Voice. It's free and easy. Google Voice generates a phone number that you can have forwarded to your cell, landline, whatever. I enter sweepstakes with this number, that way, when I receive a call to this number (my phone indicates that it's a Google Voice forwarded call), I know it's about a sweepstakes. I usually let it go to my voicemail. If it's important, they'll leave a message.
Social Media
Consider creating a Facebook account just for sweepstakes. Many sweeps are FB based, but I don't want to risk someone hacking into my account. Plus I don't need my personal FB spammed with sweeps stuff. I use a different account and don't friend anyone outside of other fellow sweepers who also have a FB just for sweeping. This way, I am not targeting myself or my friends. I don't put any info on that profile at all. I just use it to enter FB sweeps. The same could be said about Twitter, Pinterest, etc. I haven't gotten into the latter social media contests yet not do I really use those forms of social media. So, I don't have first hand experience with "alter-ego profiles" outside of Facebook.
Other Personal Information
My comfort level when giving out personal information is what's in the Phone Book. I don't mind giving out my physical address since anyone could look that up (I'm not unlisted). However, I do use a nickname when for contests I entered. The nickname is just a shorter version of my name that I rarely use outside of Sweepstaking. This is the name I use on my social media accounts as well. The biggest reason I do this is to sort quickly through my regular postal mail. If something comes to my nickname, I know it has the potential to be a win! I also like to monitor how much physical junk mail I get. Happily, I can report it is no more than maybe one ad a week, which I don't consider to be too bad.
I also don't like to give out my exact birth date. I understand why some sweepstakes want this information (trips, alcohol/tobacco related, etc. However, I just don't want to give out my birth date for personal reasons. Thus, I have resorted to being one month off from my actual birthday. I feel that this is an easy enough legitimate mistake to make that it wouldn't come in to question and, more importantly, it hasn't yet.
With any sweepstakes, if the grand prize is worth enough money ($600 or more), you have to fill out a tax form. On those, as well asliability forms or any other legal forms associated with a contest, I fill out my actual information (full name, real birth date, real phone number, etc). I've won all of my sweeps under a pseudonym and have not had any trouble claiming any of my prizes, so I will keep with this system unless i begins to cause a problem.
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Sweep entered today: 101
Amount won 2013 $33.27
Total winnings (since Jan 2011): $16,239.96
