4 ms·

Sounds like USPS is joining the panopticon-purveying surveillance capitalism game. "It's only metadata..."

• artificial 8y ago
  Joining? This is the result of it. Every parcel and package is photographed and available to LE.
  • omilu 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's all photographed and stored wether u sign up or not.
    • dylan604 8y ago
      Not sure of the down votes, but I have the same assumption. Actually, my guess is that they were doing this first, and then someone said, "Hey, we could charge people for this as a service, and then that would offset some of the costs." Of course that person would not have received a raise or bonus for the idea though.
      • rootusrootus 8y ago
        They do not, however, charge for the service.
• wil421 8y ago
  It’s well known the FBI monitors mail going through USPS. They are able to flag addresses or people for inspection and backtrack all mail.[1][2] People used to send a lot more bombs through the mail and recently anthrax. I’m supprised it’s not so well known. I’m not sure you have an expectation of privacy sending mail through anyone like USPS, FedEx, and UPS. They can open whatever they want at any time. Tracking packages should be trivial. [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-ma... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tracking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_T...
  • dontbenebby 8y ago
    >I’m not sure you have an expectation of privacy sending mail through anyone like USPS, FedEx, and UPS One of these things is not like the others. By law, first class mail cannot be opened without a warrant, absent exigent circumstances (eg: it's ticking), it's crossing an international border, or subject to a FISA warrant.[1] Those protections do not apply to UPS or Fedex. [1] https://www.rstreet.org/2014/11/19/yes-the-government-can-open-your-mail-without-a-warrant/ https://www.rstreet.org/2014/11/19/yes-the-government-can-op...
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • exegete 8y ago
      Yes, there are legal protections for the contents of your (USPS) mail, but I don't think there is much of an expectation of privacy when it comes to information on the outside of your mail (the "metadata").
• privong 8y ago
  > Sounds like USPS is joining the panopticon-purveying surveillance capitalism game. "It's only metadata..." Letters and packages are already electronically scanned to do OCR and address identification for routing purposes.
• sbuttgereit 8y ago
  The postal service has been doing this for decades. I once did data entry for the postal service; I would type in the addresses from the images of scanned mail pieces where the systems couldn't OCR the address/route by some other means. The actual mail and I were almost always in different states. That was the mid 90s. Which means they were imaging pretty much everything way back then. While the OCR and facilitating the manual entry processes are a couple of uses, I am quite sure those images had many uses with the right kind of imagination... perhaps even today... What I don't recall/remember ever knowning is if there was a retention policy....