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The postal service took action to ‘remediate’ the issue following a TechCrunch investigation
The U.S. Postal Service was sharing the postal addresses of its online customers with ad and tech giants Meta , LinkedIn and Snap , TechCrunch has bump .
On Wednesday , the USPS order it addressed the issuing and stopped the practice , claim that it was “ unaware ” of it .
TechCrunch regain USPS was sharing customers ’ information by manner of hidden information - collecting code ( also known as trailing pixels ) used across its site . technical school and advertising companies produce this sort of code to collect selective information about the user — such as which pages they chitchat — every time a webpage containing the codification load in the client ’s web web browser .
In the display case of USPS , some of that collect data included the postal addresses of logged - in USPS Informed Delivery client , who utilize the service to see photos of their incoming mail before it arrives .
It ’s not percipient how many someone had their information collected or for how long . Informed Delivery hadmore than 62 million usersas of March 2024 .
In a affirmation to TechCrunch , USPS spokesperson Jim McKean say : “ The Postal Service leverages an analytics program for our own home purposes , so that we understand the utilization of our products and services and which we use on an mass basis to market our products . ”
“ The Postal Service does not sell or leave any personal info that is collected from this analytics program to any third political party , and we were incognizant of any conformation of the political platform that garner personal info from the universal resource locator and that share it without our knowledge with social media . ”
“ We have taken prompt action to remediate this takings , ” the spokesperson say , without sound out what action was learn . The spokesperson declined to comment further .
When reach for comment , Facebook spokesperson Emil Vazquez provided a statement : “ We ’ve been clear in our policies that advertisers should not send sore 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 percolate out potentially raw data it is able to detect . ”
Snap did not react to a request for comment when contacted by TechCrunch .
In our examination , TechCrunch discovered that the USPS website shared the postal address of a logged - in USPS Informed Delivery client with Meta , LinkedIn and Snap . TechCrunch tested this by inspect the web dealings using tool bake into most modern browsers .
Our testing showed the data point - collecting code on USPS ’ internet site was scraping the client ’s address from the Informed Delivery landing varlet after client logged in , and then sending it to the company .
The codification also collected other datum , such as information about the user ’s computing machine type and browser app , which appeared as partly pseudonymized — basically beat in a elbow room that build it more difficult for mankind to jazz where data came from , or who it relates to , by using randomized identifier in place of real client epithet . But investigator havelong warned that pseudonymous data can still be used to re - describe apparently anon. individual .
TechCrunch also found that tracking numbers entered into the USPS site were also share with advertiser and tech companies , let in Bing , Google , LinkedIn , Pinterest and Snap . Some in - transit tracking data was also deal , such as the real - mankind location of the ring armour in the postal arrangement , even if the client was not logged in to USPS ’ site .
USPS ’ spokesperson declined to say if the postal servicing will ask the tech company to delete the datum that they collected .
A spokesperson for the USPS Office of Inspector General , the federal watchdog that provides oversight of the postal service , did not gloss at press fourth dimension .
USPS is the latest organization in late years to curtail its use of web tracking codification .
In 2023,telehealth health startup Cerebralandalcohol recuperation apps Tempest and Monumentrevealed they had deal private health information , admit assessments submitted by their users , with technical school and advertising company , and had since removed the tracking code .
In the same year , the Federal Trade Commission bring enforcement action at law against healthcare data goliath GoodRx , whichagreed to compensate $ 1.5 million for sharing wellness data of customerswith advertizer , and on-line therapy company BetterHelp , which wasordered to even off patients to the tune of $ 7.8 millionfor also sharing their private wellness questionnaire reply .
update with comment from Meta and Linkedin .
