After looking into it, the mail service did something to “fix” the problem.
Found that the U.S. Postal Service gave the mailing addresses of its online users to Meta, LinkedIn, and Snap, all of which are big names in advertising and technology.
The USPS said on Wednesday that it had fixed the problem and stopped doing what it was doing, saying that it was “not aware” of it.
Tech found that USPS shared customer information by using tracking pixels, which are secret pieces of code that collect data. Tech and advertising companies make this kind of code so that every time a page with the code loads in a customer’s browser, they can collect information about the user, like what sites they visit.
Some of the information that USPS collected included the mailing addresses of people who were logged in to USPS Informed Delivery. These people use the service to see pictures of their mail before it comes.
It’s not clear how long or how many people had their information taken. As of March 2024, more than 62 million people used Informed Delivery.
Jim McKean, a spokesman for the USPS, told, “The Postal Service uses an analytics platform for our own internal purposes so that we can understand how our products and services are being used and which we use to market our products on an aggregated basis.”
“The Postal Service does not sell or give any third parties any personal information that is gathered from this analytics platform. We also did not know that the platform could be set up in a way that shared personal information from the URL with social media without our knowledge.”
The spokesperson said, “We have taken immediate action to fix this problem,” but did not say what action was taken. The spokesperson refused to say anything else.
Emil Vazquez, a spokesman for Facebook, said in a statement, “We’ve made it clear in our policies that advertisers should not send personal information about people through our Business Tools.” This is against our rules, and to stop it from happening, we teach advertising how to set up Business Tools correctly. Our system is set up to get rid of any possibly sensitive information it finds.
When LinkedIn and Snap, their spokespeople did not respond right away.
In our tests, found that the USPS website gave Meta, LinkedIn, and Snap the mailing address of a USPS Informed Delivery customer who was logged in. Parhlo World checked this by looking at the network data with tools that come with most modern browsers.
Through our tests, we found that the code on USPS’s website that collected data was taking the customer’s address from the Informed Delivery home page after they logged in and sending it to the companies.
The code also gathered other information, like the user’s computer type and browser. Some of this information seemed to have been pseudonymized, which means that real customer names were replaced with random identifiers to make it harder for humans to figure out where the data came from or who it belongs to. But experts have long warned that pseudonymous data can still be used to find out who people who seem to be anonymous really are.
Also found that marketers and tech companies, such as Bing, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snap, were given tracking numbers made on the USPS website. Some tracking information about the mail in progress was also shared, like where it was in the postal system in real life, even if the customer wasn’t logged in to USPS’s website.
Someone from USPS wouldn’t say if the mail service would ask the tech companies to delete the information they had gathered.
At press time, there was no word from the USPS Office of Inspector General. This is the federal watchdog that keeps an eye on the postal service.
In the past few years, USPS is the latest company to cut back on its use of web tracking code.
In 2023, the telehealth wellness company Cerebral and the alcohol recovery apps Tempest and Monument said they had shared private health information with tech and advertising companies. They had taken down the tracking code since then.
Also Read: You Can Now Play Games on Youtube and Linkedin. Hereās How to Do It
A lot of companies in the healthcare data industry were fined by the Federal Trade Commission in the same year. GoodRx agreed to pay $1.5 million for sharing its customers’ health information with advertisers, and BetterHelp, an online therapy company, was told to pay its patients $7.8 million for sharing their private health questionnaire answers.
What do you say about this story? Visit Parhlo World For more.
