US Post Office to share citizens' addresses with Meta, LinkedIn



It turns out that the United States Postal Service (USPS) was sharing the addresses of citizens it handled online with Meta, LinkedIn, and Snap. The USPS said it was 'unaware' of the incident and has responded accordingly.

USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap | TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/18/usps-shared-customer-postal-addresses-with-meta-linkedin-and-snap/



According to the technology media TechCrunch, the USPS website was equipped with an information collection system called a '

tracking pixel .' Tracking pixels collect information such as which pages visitors to a website visit, but in the case of the USPS, it also collected the addresses of users logged into their USPS accounts. The information collected on the USPS website was shared with Meta, LinkedIn, and Snap through ad delivery tools.

USPS has developed a service called 'Informed Delivery' that notifies customers of mail information before delivery, and asks users to enter their address. As of March 2024, the number of Informed Delivery users is said to have exceeded 62 million, and the information of these users is said to have been passed on to other companies, but it is not known how much information was leaked. According to TechCrunch, USPS also collected the current location of the package and the tracking number of the package entered by the user, and this information was also shared with Bing, Google, and others.



TechCrunch reported, 'In our tests, we found data-collection code on the USPS website that scraped customer addresses from the Informed Delivery page and sent them to businesses. The code also collected information about the user's computer type and browser, but this data was partially anonymized to prevent the data from being traced back to its origin. However, some experts have warned that the data could potentially be used to identify individuals.'

A USPS spokesperson said, 'We used the analytics platform solely for internal purposes to understand usage of our products and services and were unaware that such information was being shared with other companies without our knowledge. We took immediate action to remedy this issue.'



Related Posts:

in Web Service, Posted by log1p_kr