Pirates keep wanting my cargo, but I have nothing

Solution 1:

You can't really prevent them from trying to intercept you randomly, however know that pirates are not dumb and won't usually (always?) shoot you down if you don't have any valuable cargo.

Otherwise, here are some tips to evade encounters:

• Avoid standing in the same place too long. I've found myself getting interdicted a lot less by simply always being on the move, never staying in a system or undocked longer than I have to.
• You can simply avoid FSD interdiction by aligning the escape vector during interdiction. This is the primary mean to avoid being intercepted.
• If you do get intercepted, but don't have any actual cargo and the target is not hostile to you for some reason, you can just stay put and let them scan you. They'll fire off some mean remarks and let you leave.
• Finally, if things come to worse and you know they're going to be hostile, it's a good idea to divert power to engines, use your afterburner to steer away from the enemies, and engage stealth mode. Depending on the kind of reactor you're using, you might have to fly with heatsink launchers for this to be effective.
• As an aditional tip, the jump gravity interference formula depends on relative ship mass. This usually means that ships with higher mass will take less time to jump when interdicted by ships with lower mass.