They know where you live

While you're busy bickering about what happens to personal data online, the post office is selling your new home address to junk mailers.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Apr 20, 2000 | It's a daily ritual that's best performed over an open trash can -- murdering the mail. You have to cull through reams of unrequested catalogs, brochures, fliers and other solicitations to rescue the mail you actually want before committing the left-over marketing literature to the circular file.

There's no "opt-in" for snail-mail marketing; here, your address is fair game for anyone who can get hold of it, unless you care to waste more time demanding to be taken off mailing lists. What's worse, the United States Postal Service, and its national database of permanent address changes, is actually a quiet contributor to the proliferation of physical spam.

This year the USPS estimates it will earn $5.2 million by licensing change of address data to private sector companies, keeping junk mailers' address books up-to-date. And that doesn't include the fees the USPS collects -- at 50 cents a pop -- from every piece of mail it forwards that's labeled "Address Correction Requested"; the post office alerts the senders to the new address. In doing so, it plays a role in making sure that all the marketing literature you never wanted in the first place, follows you wherever you go, whether you want it to or not.

"We do not sell mailing lists!" says Postal Service spokesman Gerald Kreienkamp, emphatically. Sell lists? No ... well, not exactly. The post office won't directly sell your address to junk mailers the way spammers might harvest and sell e-mail addresses on CD -- but, if you fill out a change of address card when you move, the USPS will make money making your new address available to anyone who had the old one.

In the last four years, the General Accounting Office has twice investigated the Postal Service's methods of handling change of address and found that the USPS is not being as careful with our personal data as it could be. But while 18 states and the federal government have enacted or are considering legislation to contain junk e-mail, there's been no public outcry, much less legislation, about the USPS change of address database. It's all the more surprising since what's at issue is how a government organization -- remember, "We, the people" are supposed to control those? -- is handling or potentially mishandling our personal information.

It would seem that we just don't get as up in arms about physical junk mail as we do about spam. Maybe we're so used to the snail-mail form, that we don't register it. Or, perhaps junk mail is just not as annoying as e-mail spam, since unlike the electronic kind which pops frenetically into our e-mail in boxes in a disturbing cacophony of interruptions, we only have to deal with the postal kind once a day.

Tom Geller of Suespammers.org says it's the cost of e-mail spam that galls: aside from the time sink, we pay in hiked up ISP prices, hotel phone charges, wireless modem charges. With junk mail, the financial cost is borne by the sender.

Nick Nicholas, director of policy and communications for the Mail Abuse Prevention System, a California non-profit, thinks that it's the invasiveness of e-mail spam that's sparked the outrage about it.

"Spam invades the inner sanctum. People have their computers in their bedrooms or their offices. This is definitely a private space. It's not just a box hanging outside your house," he says. But he believes that the fight against e-mail spam has caused a new awareness of other forms of invasive direct marketing; he predicts a "backlash" against other forms of direct marketing when all the spam legislation gets hammered out. "People are becoming mobilized over this issue."

"Direct marketers have been invading people's privacy for years, but it hasn't been very visible," says Jason Catlett, the privacy advocate behind Junkbusters. "Now, since spam and cookies and the other means of data gathering have been put literally in front of people's faces, they're becoming more aware of the machinery working against them."

And the United States Postal Service is certainly part of the machinery that delivers your daily junk mail. Imagine the outcry if every time you changed e-mail addresses, your ISP handed out your new address to anyone who had the old one. That's kind of what the USPS does with your home or work address. "If you have a reason for not wanting anyone to know where you are, the post office is not your friend," says Bob Gellman, a Washington privacy consultant.

Next Page: The post office washes its hands of what the customers of its licensees do with the data

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