[HN Gopher] USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, Lin...
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USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap
Author : leotravis10
Score : 153 points
Date : 2024-07-18 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| nullc wrote:
| Government sites shouldn't load any third party content.
| xeromal wrote:
| I assume they are because they're broke
| financetechbro wrote:
| Government agencies are not meant to be profitable
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Tell that to the people who keep getting elected. Takes
| time to repair poor decisions resulting from electorate
| whims.
|
| https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/04/senators-call-
| pos...
|
| https://fortune.com/2024/04/10/usps-dejoy-price-hikes-
| custom... | https://archive.is/b03We
| xeromal wrote:
| Yup, it's hard to fault the postal service when the game
| is rigged against them from congress.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Right. And they are meant (?) to be transparent.
|
| Only individual's information must be kept private.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Uselessly tied up budget and so many strings attached is
| functionally identical to broke.
|
| I have a friend who works at USGS in California, the folks
| who track (among other things) volcanic and tectonic
| activity on the west side of the US (that includes
| Yellowstone).
|
| For their field trips, they have a daily stipend for food &
| lodging of ~$100 IIRC. If you know the cost of lodging, you
| can understand how that's a ridiculously small amount.
| abduhl wrote:
| Per diem rates can be looked up at
| https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-a-trip/per-diem-rates.
| The standard combined rate is $166: $107 for lodging and
| $59 for meals and incidentals. This is adjusted for high
| COL locations. Many hotels have a deal with the
| government where rates are subsidized. Government
| employees should pay no taxes on their stays.
|
| So yeah, they're not staying at the Ritz on government
| business (and they shouldn't be!) but it's not like
| they're living in a tent.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| OK. How do you propose to fix the current situation, then?
|
| Completely impractical "yeah, but"-isms basically turn HN
| into an online political rally. This isn't thoughtful
| conversation.
| gosub100 wrote:
| USPS is not the government, they are one of the world's most
| prolific spammers.
| toast0 wrote:
| How do you figure? Establishing Post Offices is a
| Constitutionally enumerated power of Congress, and the USPS
| exists as a Federal Agency since the Postal Reorganization
| Act of 1970 [1]:
|
| > The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a
| basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the
| Government of the United States, authorized by the
| Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by
| the people.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Reorganization_Act
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| While I don't necessarily agree, the argument is that the
| 1970 postal reorganization act required the postal office
| to be self funded, and that since they are not funded with
| any federal dollars they are somewhere between a government
| service and a private service. Some argue that because of
| this we have seen a significant degredation in the quality
| of mail, because the USPS explicitly and intentionally
| delivers the equivilent of spam mail to every address in
| the country. They do this as a form of generating revenue
| that wouldn't be required of a proper government service.
| This ties into the current post as it seems plausible the
| reason USPS shares customer data with Meta is due to their
| requirement of self funding.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Government sites shouldn 't load any third party content._
|
| For a work project, I recently had to visit about 200
| government web sites from countries all over the world.
|
| It's surprising how many of them not only load third-party
| content, but actually have banner and pop-over advertising on
| them, especially in Asia and Africa.
|
| By comparison, even America's worst government web site1 is
| better.
|
| 1 https://njfamilycare.dhs.state.nj.us
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Seeing a page like that is refreshing these days. Loaded in a
| fraction of a second on my cellphone. Healthcare.gov on the
| other hand shows a blank screen on firefox mobile for ios.
| wepple wrote:
| At first I kinda recoiled at the horror of 1990s color.
|
| But then, yeah, it loads fast and does what it needs to do.
| I don't think I'd want my taxpayer money getting some hip
| design studio to "modernize" it.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Wow, it's not even .gov
| dheera wrote:
| I couldn't buy I-bonds from the US Treasury website because
| they are using a third party identity verification. WTF? Third
| parties can't verify me, I've infiltrated private companies
| with nonsense to protect my privacy. Ask the IRS, DMV, DHS, or
| USCIS instead to verify me, damnit.
| fortran77 wrote:
| U.S. Savings bonds are something you "set and forget" and
| don't check up on them for decades. I had a HELL of a time
| acessing my online account (had to get someone from my
| congressman's office to get a Treasury Department manager on
| my case) to check my bonds that I bought in 2003 and, yes, I
| had my username, password, and the second factor stored in my
| safe deposit box, and access to the email I used to sign up
| for it.
|
| The problem was the Treasury obsoleted the second factor they
| issued in 2003 (a physical lookup card with numbers on it)
| and I had to reverify myself. They couldn't log me in with
| the information I used to log into Treasury Direct two
| decades ago.
|
| Reverification required entering information like the
| Driver's Licence number I had in 2003 and the DL expiration
| date of my 2003 licence (I don't know! It was in another
| state and I no longer have it) and some other security
| questions I apparently answered when signing up and short-
| sightedly didn't write down ("Favorite Vacation Destination")
|
| Good luck logging in to check your iBonds 30 years from now!
| The don't issue paper bonds anymore to anyone. Maybe they're
| hoping for "breakage" -- people will simply forget they own
| them!
| digging wrote:
| Tracking pixels are just insane. I can't imagine a non-
| regulatory/legislative solution when the biggest companies on the
| planet will pay you money just to put a script on your page. How
| does that get outcompeted? Someone richer pays you to _not_ sell
| out your users? Just ban this shit.
| throwaway3306a wrote:
| How does the law differentiate that from jQuery on a CDN? The
| CDN is also doing some amount of tracking, and some of it is
| simply technically necessary. Google is actually using the
| Google Fonts service to track traffic.
| mdavidn wrote:
| A CDN delivering something like jQuery will not receive
| cookies nor query parameters and will return a very generous
| max-age, allowing the browser to reuse the resource for any
| number of pages or sites without contacting the CDN again.
|
| The value of CDNs like this has diminished greatly with the
| advent of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| But it could start delivering not-jQuery at some point.
| Far-fetched on the surface, but it's exactly what occurred
| with polyfill.io recently:
|
| https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-
| research/2024...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40791829
| mdavidn wrote:
| This is true, but there is a mitigation available: The
| site can require the resource to match a specified
| cryptographic hash before running. This did not work with
| polyfill.io because that CDN would dynamically return
| different resources based on the user agent.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...
| rvnx wrote:
| Technically CDNs are not needed, we could just fully drop
| CDNs as well and cache files by content hash in the
| browser across multiple sites (<script hash="AAAAAAAAA"
| fallback="https://cdn..."></script>, instead of by path).
|
| It would make the web faster and reduce tracking.
|
| Now, is that really what Google Fonts or Cloudflare CDN
| wants ?
|
| Maybe, but it will reduce the amount of data shared to
| the intelligence groups.
| Lukas_Skywalker wrote:
| Caching across sites is a privacy risk in itself, because
| scripts can measure the time required to load a resource
| and therefore detect if a visitor has visited another
| site with the same resource before. That's why modern
| browsers no longer cache across sites.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894135
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| It's hilarious that your off-the-cuff solution to
| "stopping data being shared to the intelligence groups"
| is itself reintroducing a known and now-mitigated
| security vulnerability.
|
| This stuff isn't easy. HN has way too big a head.
| digging wrote:
| I mean I'm not writing a literal law, but that would be
| roughly illegal and punishable in my fantasy world where
| a right to digital privacy existed. Laws, as a rule,
| don't physically stop anyone from doing anything they
| want. Plenty of illicit things happen on the internet
| already.
| digging wrote:
| > How does the law differentiate that from jQuery on a CDN?
| The CDN is also doing some amount of tracking, and some of it
| is simply technically necessary.
|
| I don't know, it might be an intractable problem. It sucks
| how there's no way to tell the difference between the
| payloads of two different 3rd party scripts when they're
| executed in the browser, huh?
| tmoertel wrote:
| > Google is actually using the Google Fonts service to track
| traffic.
|
| According to https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq/privacy#
| when_i_embed...,
|
| "For clarity, Google does not use any information collected
| by Google Fonts to create profiles of end users or for
| targeted advertising."
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Make possession of PII highly risky so the value of collecting
| this data becomes negative. Then you don't have to come up with
| cat-and-mouse regulations trying to chase down the latest
| workaround of the law as companies won't want the liability
| that comes with possession of the data in the first place.
| digging wrote:
| Indeed that's a far preferable and more effective approach.
| PII should be radioactive. Let's see who really _needs_ it to
| run their business.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > When reached for comment, Facebook spokesperson Emil Vazquez
| provided a statement: "We've been clear in our policies that
| advertisers should not send sensitive information about people
| through our Business Tools. Doing so is against our policies, and
| we educate advertisers on properly setting up Business Tools to
| prevent this from occurring. [...]
|
| Seems pretty convenient to blame the people using the tool.
|
| > Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data
| it is able to detect."
|
| And just how much attention is spent making that work well? Or is
| that really just an afterthought with no ongoing improvements so
| that they can say they tried?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I mean, filtering messages that contain _addresses_ ... That
| must be an almost impossible task to do for machines of a multi
| billion dollar company!
| tqi wrote:
| Is it also Apple's fault when people send inappropriate
| messages via imessage?
| cute_boi wrote:
| > We've been clear in our policies that advertisers should not
| send sensitive information about people through our Business
| Tools. Doing so is against our policies, and we educate
| advertisers on properly setting up Business Tools to prevent this
| from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially
| sensitive data it is able to detect.
|
| Please stop denying the fact that you could have disabled usps
| when they sent the sensitive data. But why would facebook/meta do
| it when they need so data.
|
| And, why is USPS even using meta etc..
| moomoo11 wrote:
| I hate using usps address change because they always leak my
| address.
|
| I didn't do it once when I had a short stint and that addrsss
| isn't leaked...
| tbyehl wrote:
| They don't leak your address, they sell it.
|
| https://postalpro.usps.com/mailing-and-shipping-services/NCO...
| richwater wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Who said that they don't? One person voting for a
| politician doesn't change governmental policy JUST for
| them. How unnecessarily condescending.
| uoaei wrote:
| "instead" is the operative word here. It's commentary on
| priorities and reactionary attitudes.
|
| Please don't inflame the conversation with more combative
| language.
| mulmen wrote:
| Yeah who wants a baby soaked in bath water? Throw it out!
| mrj wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| They also give it away for free when you select to receive
| offers from whatever stores they've "partnered" with
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| When I moved a year ago, I didn't file an address change. I
| only gave it to my bank and a few others I needed to keep
| informed of my address. Almost none of the junk from my old
| address has followed me to my new address. One annoying
| exception has been the DMV in my new state informing the
| Secretary of State in my old state that I surrendered my old
| state's license for one in my new state. The SoS sent me a
| letter asking if the move was permanent or not because if so,
| they wanted to remove me from my old state's voting roll. I
| understand the desire to keep voting rolls clean but I'm not
| happy that this happened behind my back. Plus before I moved, I
| went to the SoS's site for my old state and informed them that
| I was moving and should be removed. I'm guessing they get a
| feed from other states and just mail everyone without checking
| if you've already been removed. Given the general incompetence
| of the SoS in my old state, it's probably just a matter of time
| before they leak out my new address to interested parties. I
| haven't registered to vote in my new state and unregistered in
| my old state so it's not like I'm trying to double vote or even
| vote at all.
| lh7777 wrote:
| Another option is to use the temporary address change form
| instead of the permanent one. You can have your mail
| temporarily forwarded for up to a year. Permanent forwarding
| also only lasts for a year. The only difference is that the
| USPS notifies everyone of your new address for permanent
| forwarding, but not for temporary. Just keep an eye out for
| any forwarded mail and notify the sender yourself if it's
| something you want to keep receiving.
| pushcx wrote:
| It makes sense that USPS considers it a bug to freely give away
| the data that it sells: https://postalpro.usps.com/mailing-and-
| shipping-services/NCO...
| troupo wrote:
| On top of all this people keep uncritically posting news like
| "Meta will not provide AI models to EU due to regulatory
| uncertainty"
|
| Shit like this is the only "uncertainty"
| xyst wrote:
| Only need to sign up for informed delivery via website, then the
| service sends e-mail and/or texts. Have rarely needed to use
| their site directly.
|
| Still it's a major oversight on their part. I wonder if the
| tracking pixel is loaded as part of "social login" or "social
| media integration".
|
| Yet another reason I don't use that shit, and heavily block them
| across all sites.
| sphars wrote:
| Can anyone confirm if there are tracking pixels or similar on
| the emails themselves? I too never visit the website, I just
| look at the emails.
| spike021 wrote:
| Some of the email themselves have ads too. For instance the
| latest one for me has a Chase banking ad.
| zzyzxd wrote:
| USPS Informed Delivery emails have tracking pixels. But all
| the mail scans are just attachments to the emails. You can
| configure email client to not load any remote content and the
| they will still get rendered pretty nicely. I was pretty
| surprised to see those attachments in the first place,
| because some of the scans were quite large (a few hundreds
| KBs).
| xyst wrote:
| I can't say for sure, but haven't worried about it since I
| opted to _not_ load remote content in e-mail messages.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| PAY ME!!!
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Wait until you hear that the USPS scans the front and back of
| every piece of mail that passes through its high-speed scanners,
| stores it for an unknown period of time, and makes those records
| available to law enforcement.
|
| Those images are part of their 'informed delivery' service which
| you can sign up for.
|
| I've noticed on a number of occasions that the contents of the
| envelope were noticeable without enhancement and legible with
| simple contrast/level adjustment.
| kyleee wrote:
| Another example of dragnet spying. People are too stressed to
| care
| jeffbee wrote:
| No they just _don 't_ care. The kind of privacy maximalism
| found on HN appeals to one in a million. It is not a
| mainstream issue at all.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| > the contents of the envelope were noticeable
|
| I've seen that as well, but I place the blame on the sender for
| using an envelope that isn't fully opaque.
| uoaei wrote:
| It's pretty hard to believe they don't also regularly use
| endoscopes on random or suspicious packages when there's a
| little space to insert one.
| vzaliva wrote:
| Clickbait title: USPS did not share anything intentionally. They
| negligently allowed tracking pixels from certain companies on
| their Informed Delivery page.
|
| Of course, it's terrible from a privacy point of view, but let's
| be honest and call things as they are.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| How can a tracking pixel cause a customers postal address to be
| sent to Meta?
| slotrans wrote:
| 1. customer enters their address in form fields
|
| 2. those form field values are templated into a GET request
| to the Meta tracking pixel (or POST request to the /events
| endpoint, or ...)
|
| 3. profit
|
| they've made it very easy
| https://developers.facebook.com/docs/meta-
| pixel/implementati...
| slotrans wrote:
| it could have been much worse, I have seen passwords leaked
| this way
|
| ("seen" meaning "I worked at a company where this happened
| and read the code with my own eyes" not just "I read it in
| the newspaper")
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| OK, based on your link the answer to my question seems to
| be: it's _not_ a tracking pixel, but the "Meta Pixel",
| which the documentation describes as "a snippet of
| JavaScript code".
| jameshart wrote:
| Welcome to the wonderful world of affiliate marketing,
| adtech, and tag management.
|
| In that world, third party 'tags' that are included in a
| page are generally referred to as 'pixels'. Sometimes
| they are single pixel img tags. Frequently they are
| scripts. But the industry calls them 'pixels' anyway.
|
| It is, surprisingly, not a terribly honest industry.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Yeah semantic drift haha...
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/3331fdec-c69c-46b0-9ffe-c48848f
| b29...
| segasaturn wrote:
| Why on earth is a government website linking _anything_ from
| Facebook, Snapchat, etc? USPS isn 't a trendy coffee shop or a
| designer brand, they're a federal agency of the United States
| government and should be held to a higher trust and privacy
| standard.
| mindslight wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with where you're coming from, but
| don't try to login to your IRS account these days without
| first taking some Xanax (tm).
| Klonoar wrote:
| I am pretty sure they said they'd reevaluate that ID login
| change but instead rammed it through.
|
| I think about it every time I have to use it.
| mindslight wrote:
| The worst part is that it had been working just fine for
| me before. I already had a login that I think had been
| verified via postal mail. My IRS account obviously isn't
| going anywhere. Why do I have to create a _completely
| new_ login, just to use _less secure_ surveillance based
| authentication? It smells of corruption where someone
| gets a kickback based on how many people they can herd
| into the surveillance industry slaughterhouse. There are
| probably several layers of indirection (grift) because
| "government can't do anything", but that's still the
| underlying dynamic.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| You are all over the place.
|
| The person that you're replying to already called it
| negligent. It's clear that it's negligent.
|
| That's different from USPS not having some "legitimate"
| reason to use a Facebook tracking pixel _somewhere_.
|
| I'm not even American, but I just spent 30 seconds on the
| USPS site and came across an online store where you can buy
| gifts, etc. This reasonably puts them well within the
| ballpark of an organisation that'd seek to use this sort of
| tech. As anyone that's worked with anyone in ecommerce
| marketing will tell you, there's always organisational
| pressure to shove these 'tracking pixels' onto your site.
|
| Again, it's negligent that they did it, from a privacy POV.
| But let's not conflate that with 'old man grumbling about
| social networks'.
| rty32 wrote:
| As the parent comment has explained, all USPS is doing -- at
| least from their perspective -- is to use some third-party
| analytics tools, without intentionally or specifically
| linking to Facebook or Snapchat.
|
| Or put it this way -- is there a data analytics platform that
| is suitable & easy to use for any US government agency? Not
| that I am aware of (but please let me know). Without such
| infrastructure, these government organizations understandably
| are looking for those commercial options.
| segasaturn wrote:
| While I find it questionable that a government agency
| should be collecting analytics on its visitors in the first
| place, there are self-hosted analytics tools that they can
| use. One Google search turns up plausible.io which, even if
| its less convenient than Google would help with trust. It
| seems we've completely normalized the State conducting mass
| surveillance, tracking and metadata collection on citizens
| with the aid of corporate tech giants like Google.
| adenylyl wrote:
| The US government does run its own self-hosted analytics
| platform (https://analytics.usa.gov), which the USPS does
| in fact use. Which makes it all the more questionable
| that they were additionally using third-party analytics.
| Symbiote wrote:
| And now you see why the GDPR requires a site to list the
| third parties involved.
|
| https://www.royalmail.com/privacy-notice and the cookie
| policy, 3.4.
| uoaei wrote:
| Security and similar audits are a big deal in government.
| Or, at least, they were...
| nerdponx wrote:
| Is Matomo not suitable?
| jokoon wrote:
| because that's how the guberment collects data
|
| frankly I prefer when it's the government rather than
| companies selling it to foreign countries or scammers
| Eumenes wrote:
| Defund the USPS. They absolutely suck. 60% of their volume is
| junk mail. Lets save the planet.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > They negligently allowed tracking pixels from certain
| companies on their Informed Delivery page.
|
| I had to work on a feature like that, where individual client-
| companies wanted to sprinkle arbitrary pixel-trackers across
| different steps in our website's workflow for their users...
| Even today, I worry I wasn't paranoid enough.
|
| _______
|
| For the curious/critiquing: When conditions are met, the main
| page JS creates a temporary <iframe src="..." sandbox="allow-
| scripts allow-same-origin">, with a signed and time-limited URL
| to a _different subdomain_ , which hosts the corresponding icky
| arbitrary markup.
|
| Yes, I know about the srcdoc attribute, and that would have
| been much easier _except_ it breaks some tracker-code (i.e.
| Google Tag Manager) because the tracker has logic looking for
| things that are only present on a "real page."
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| If they allowed the tracking pixels, they intentionally shared
| the data. We all know what the tracking pixels do.
| DevKoala wrote:
| This is so naive. When you allow those tracking pixels you get
| paid to do it.
| gwerbret wrote:
| > Clickbait title: USPS did not share anything intentionally.
| They negligently allowed tracking pixels from certain companies
| on their Informed Delivery page.
|
| You needed to read through to the end of the article.
| TechCrunch did its own testing and confirmed that the mentioned
| sites were scraping data from the USPS, including but not
| limited to the postal addresses. The negligence that allowed
| USPS to leak such information in the name of analytics or
| whatever it is they were gaining from Facebook et al. is
| unconscionable, and USPS are very much responsible, just as
| they would be for a trivial hack with the same effect.
| muteh wrote:
| So the data wasn't shared? These companies do not have USPS
| PII?
| ysacfanboi wrote:
| This perhaps explains why I couldn't successfully submit the
| change of address forms while my ad and tracker blocker was on.
| Why is this legal?
| ta988 wrote:
| Now go ask your bank that does the same... And your local
| government, and your dentist appointment tracking system and...
| XCSme wrote:
| I am happy that my building has this pick-up box system:
| https://www.my-pup.com
|
| When you order, you enter their own address and name, so neither
| the delivery company, nor the web shop, have your details.
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