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They don't leak your address, they sell it. https://postalpro.usps.com/mailing-and-shipping-services/NCOALink https://postalpro.usps.com/mailing-and-shipping-s

• richwater 2y ago
  Yet another reason I wouldn't care if the USPS shut down for good. Between delivering spam mail and selling my addresses, they provide net-negative value to my life.
  • steego 2y ago
    How about you vote for politicians that pass laws to protect your privacy and minimize junk mail instead? I personally use the USPS quite a bit to ship things and I prefer to use them over FedEx or UPS any chance I get.
    • cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
      Who said that they don’t? One person voting for a politician doesn’t change governmental policy JUST for them. How unnecessarily condescending.
      • uoaei 2y ago
        "instead" is the operative word here. It's commentary on priorities and reactionary attitudes. Please don't inflame the conversation with more combative language.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • mulmen 2y ago
    Yeah who wants a baby soaked in bath water? Throw it out!
  • mrj 2y ago
    The USPS is treated differently by Congress and is required to fund itself, unlike basically any other government service. It's unfortunate that something that was historically trustworthy has been essentially turned into some kind of weird government profit-making mashup. I don't think USPS is a net-bad though. I can only imagine how bad Fedex and UPS would become if they didn't have to compete with the USPS. And they're already pretty bad. But yeah.. wish they only delivered mail.
  • snypher 2y ago
    Looking forward to an Amazon courier throwing my vehicle tabs in the river then marking 'delivered'.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    Your address is basically public information in a number of different ways (e.g. voter registration rolls and real estate transactions) unless you take a lot of steps, including using legal entities, to obfuscate it. I'm not going to specifically defend USPS practices but your address isn't really private in the US and many other places.
    • SoftTalker 2y ago
      Very true and this is why I’m not surprised by TechCrunch’s discoveries here. I just assumed they were tracking and selling the data as they always have been. I assume they’re selling the images of everyone’s mail as well.
  • rgovostes 2y ago
    I tend to agree, it is a net negative for me too. My weekly tour of the mail room is to discard junk mail that I ceaselessly try to opt out of. When I asked for them to stop delivering the magazine subscriptions of a previous tenant addressed to "or Current Resident", they told me they are not allowed to do so. Once I chose to send a package through them, and I watched the tracking as the package rerouted to their lost mail center in Atlanta ("Mail Recovery Center", a misnomer if there ever was one). How could it be lost if they were still updating the tracking information? (Naturally, it was never "found".) I briefly forwarded my mail to a relative's address while I was out of the country for an extended period, and they sold that to numerous institutions without my permission, creating a headache to unwind. To this day knowledge-based authentication systems quiz me about an address I never lived at. I don't get a warm and fuzzy patriotic feeling from having a national postal service. If anything it feels like an anachronism. Paper mail has been virtually irrelevant to me my entire life.
• dylan604 2y ago
  They also give it away for free when you select to receive offers from whatever stores they've "partnered" with