he U.S. Postal Service was sharing the postal addresses of its online customers with advertising and tech giants Meta, LinkedIn and Snap, TechCrunch has found.
On Wednesday, the USPS said it addressed the issue and stopped the practice, claiming that it was “unaware” of it.
TechCrunch found USPS was sharing customers’ information by way of hidden data-collecting code (also known as tracking pixels) used across its website.
Tech and advertising companies create this kind of code to collect information about the user — such as which pages they visit — every time a webpage containing the code loads in the customer’s browser.
When reached for comment, Facebook spokesperson Emil Vazquez provided a statement: “We’ve been clear in our policies that advertisers should not send sensitive 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 filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.”
LinkedIn spokesperson Brionna Ruff said much to the same effect, noting that “customer ad tools and agreements are clear and prohibit them from sharing sensitive data with us.”
Snap did not respond to a request for comment when contacted by TechCrunch.
In our testing, TechCrunch discovered that the USPS website shared the postal address of a logged-in USPS Informed Delivery customer with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap.
TechCrunch tested this by inspecting the network traffic using tools baked into most modern browsers.
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