Did you know this about the USPS?

They scan the envelope, not the contents. That is the small barcode at the bottom of the envelope, and the piece of tape they put on post cards.

Yes, that’s how they track packages.

As @zenvelo writes, they scan the address, they don’t open the envelopes and scan the contents.

I signed up for the service (InformedDelivery) a while ago. They send an email with pictures of the incoming envelopes.

I stopped it after a week or so. It’s not that interesting. It’s not like I can act on anything before I get home and open the mail anyway.

The USPS has been technologically advanced for a long time.

Here’s a 1970 video showing how the optical character reader worked. Each machine read 42,000 envelopes per hour!

Youtube – ‘Reading and Sorting Mail Automatically’ 1970 US Postal Service

Also, scanning to read the address isn’t the same thing as keeping a visual image scan of every package, or of associating whatever information they retain about the packages with a database of known senders or recipients.

Not a big surprise. UPS and FedEx do the same things. I took something to the UPS store the other day and they input the name of the person to whom we were sending the package and notified me they had that person in our account, but that we had mailed previous packages to a different address (the recipient had recently moved). Seems a bit excessive, but really, what are they going to do with the information?

@Call_Me_Jay – yes, I’ve had that Informed Delivery service since they started it. It works, and it is especially valuable when I am out of town and need to see if certain correspondence (or a check) has come in the mail.

The flaw with it is that it isn’t complete enough. It does just fine with first class mail and envelopes. However, it doesn’t include 2nd class mail (magazines). And as far as I can tell, it doesn’t include packages either.

Hmmm, thanks. I thought it was interesting and a few people at the presentation were pretty taken aback about the privacy situations. Even if it’s not the content, say you get letters from a family member in the slammer…I’m not naive enough to think there’s not an information gathering system storing that info. I have nothing to hide, but perhaps some people do.

@KNOWITALL Part of the discomfort may come from applying a 2018 sensibility to a 1970’s process. 40 years ago, nobody had a concern about big data tracking of your mail.

As I understand it, the scanning of the front of your mail isn’t specifically for snooping and intelligence, or at least it wasn’t at first.

My understanding is that they scan the fronts for two reasons:

- a handwritten zip code that is not computer legible, then the sorting device sends that image to a human to decipher. That person figures out the Zip code and tells the system what to spray onto the envelope. The employee doing the deciphering is hundreds of miles away at a desk, so he sees the image on his screen.

- planning purposes. If the sorting computer detects a whole lot of mail for a particular town or post office, it alerts the baggers (or truck drivers) to expect more load that day.

-

I guess the surprise was that they’ve been doing it for over two decades for whatever purposes without public knowledge. Now that mail is not as common due to online, who would be surprised at them using that information for other purposes? Certainly not me, although as I’ve stated in previous threads, people are only afraid of losing the IDEA of privacy.

If you ever get the opportunity to visit inside a USPS distribution site, do that. You will instantly loose all worry, when you think about how many of those places there are nationwide, each handling such enormous volumes of mail, you would have to possess the biggest ego of the world to think they would seek info about you amidst all that.

There would be room for concern if the post office kept a permanent record of the mail to and from individuals and sold it to outsiders. They don’t do that.

Of course…for a long time. You can have an email sent to you each day with pictures of the mail to be delivered to you. That way you can be sure it all makes it. I do not do this but it has been an option for quite a while.