A U.S. Postal Service program designed to make it easier for people to forward mail to their new homes has jeopardized the privacy of millions of addresses, according to a government watchdog.
The program allows customers to submit their address changes by mailing or hand-delivering a hard copy of the information on their new address to the post office or by entering it into an online form.
Hundreds of licensed businesses then acquire that information from the Postal Service and ultimately sell it to companies looking for mailboxes to fill with ads. The licensees work with USPS and companies through a digital program known as the National Change of Address Linkage, which contains more than 160 million change-of-address records.
But Postal Service officials store the new addresses on outdated computers that “a person could crack” due to their lack of digital security, according to the USPS inspector general. Another problem is the fact hard copies of customers’ private information have been piled into boxes and left in open areas of Postal Service facilities where any employee could access the files.
The 515 licensees who have access to change-of-address form information are the subjects of little oversight from the Postal Service, according to the IG.
Though USPS rules require security checks on the licensees, officials “have never performed site security reviews of licensees’ environments” and no longer ask businesses to submit security plans when they apply for licenses.
The IG auditors discovered licensees store private home addresses on databases shared by other companies, transmit digital data in ways that violate Postal Service policy and fail to list all the entities with which they share customer information.
Access to the information is supposed to be only available to businesses in the U.S., but the report found 2,674 international mailers have agreements with licensees and that home addresses are being stored in nine sites outside the country.
More than $228 million in information and 13 million addresses are at risk thanks to the security lapses, according to the IG. An estimated 39 million Americans changed their principal address in 2013.
Go here to read the USPS IG report.
