IIUC part of the reason is so that you can sue people. You need to know their address to serve them papers. IIUC this is part of the reason why anyone is allowe

IIUC part of the reason is so that you can sue people. You need to know their address to serve them papers. IIUC this is part of the reason why anyone is allowed to snail-mail you and we don't have spam laws for physical mail like we do for email, phone, ... It seems pretty antiquated though and can be putting people at risk. Maybe there should be some form of indirection here where the government can be responsible for notifying you in cases like this and you can indicate who you are suing based on based on either the business or some sort of more opaque identifier. Not to mention that an address is a bad identifier as it is not unique, becomes invalid/more confusing over time among other reasons.