USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap

mox@lemmy.sdf.org to News@lemmy.world – 237 points –
Exclusive: USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap
techcrunch.com
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USPS sells this information for mail advertising. If you don't want to be included in that, you can opt out via USPS.

Fill out Form 1500 and drop it by a post office to be removed from ad lists. It's free.

And they wouldn't have to sell ad space if they actually got funding

A kneecap here, a hobbling there... well USPS, you ain't lookin so hot. Might need to cut your funding. Again.

Why the fuck is DeJoy still there again???

Well, the post office is supposed to be self funding.

Its a government service, it should be funded by the taxes we already pay

100%. That is how public services work (for the person you replied to).

I'd rather the post office sell ads than our taxes be increased. Government funding ain't free and if the USPS can't support itself financially at least for the most part then it's incredibly vulnerable to privatization and elimination by Republicans.

They don't need to increase taxes, they need to remove the person trying to cripple the USPS and allow it to be properly funded with the billions already collected every year.

As a postal contractor I don't see any evidence of an effort to cripple the USPS from within.

Form 1500 is involving unwanted sexually oriented mail. How does it stop spam? You have to provide specific mailings you want to stop.

That's like the one piece of mail I may actually look at before throwing out.

Yeah is form 1400 how we sign up for sexually explicit mail?

Best I can do is a sexually explicit male, take him or leave him.

Tell me you didn't read the article without telling me you didn't read the article.

This is about tracking pixels.

My outrage energy has plummeted

GOP policies functioning as designed.

GOP loves to target useful government programs that help normal folks.

  1. Slash the funding and try to install leaders that may favor GOP policies.
  2. Point to the project and the talk about how poor of a job they’re doing.
  3. Slash the funding again.
  4. Point to the project and the talk about how poor of a job they’re doing.
  5. Slash the funding again.
  6. Point to the project and the talk about how poor of a job they’re doing. …

I wonder if this is where all those stupid USPS your package is waiting text scams came from?

Your postal address is displayed right there at the top of the page when you're signed in and looking at the "dashboard," so it's readily available bold as brass for anyone to scrape. The real question is, why was third party code even allowed to be served with that page? What possible benefit could it serve the user to have Meta and LinkedIn tracking pixels on their postal mail dashboard?

That was a rhetorical question. The answer is money, and how much of it those social media/tech companies were paying the Postal Service to allow them to do it -- end user be damned. The notion that the USPS was "unaware" of this reeks so bad that you could smell it from space.

i'd be more shocked if a government agency (outside the DOD) managed NOT to leak my data.

That very breach is when I started keeping my credit reports frozen, which I highly recommend everyone look into doing.

I didn't know that was a thing. Thanks. I'll look in to that.

Many of the credit reporting agencies will try to sell you on a subscription service that includes a credit “lock” feature that’s pretty much the same thing, but all of them are required to offer a free way to freeze your report so don’t let them talk you into it. Unless you’re interested in the other features of the subscription, which can be useful.