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Comment by m3047 | Hacker News Reader

I assume the USPS "Informed Delivery" service is the same thing, repackaged for the mail recipient(s). (I'm a subscriber FWIW.)

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I subscribe ťo the same service and I find it pretty handy. There's no way to stop the incessant junk mail so it helps me filter what needs prompt pickup and the junk that can stay a couple days before I check the mailbox.

I was going to say that for every mail item I get an image by email the day before or that day. My Apple photos search function often shows new images with words that are the search term in them, for example if I search “apple” I’ll get images with “apple orchard” in a sign. Put those two together and that’s likely what the FBI and etc have access to. Good thing I don’t get much mail, but I guess the FBI knows that I’m getting prescriptions in the mail or maybe they know I donate to certain causes. Privacy is dead in the USA.

I mean 100 years ago if you had gotten a letter from "US communist party", your mail carrier would likely have reported it directly, without any fancy automation.

The outside of envelopes has never been particularly private, so I'm not seeing it as a policy change so much as an implementation change to support scale.

I don’t believe the argument holds. Just because individuals could see your mail is not equivalent to an automated agent looking at every piece of your mail every day from miles away and creating a profile of you. This is the true slippery slope, that we allow this processing for more and more data. Eventually, every bit of our lives will be processed and profiled at this rate!

Yeah, Quantity has a Quality all its own.

Every time I hear an argument for surveillance that boils down to “well they could just stand there and watch you do the $activity,” I lightly lose my mind.

CCTV, ALNRs, facial recognition, etc. All of these are technically “just” advanced versions of the old fashioned stake-out. But that makes all the difference in the world.

Yep, these folks would have us think a nuke is equivalent to a rock since they’re both used to kill people.

In general, yes. In this specific case a person who lives in your community and looks at the letters going into your mailbox everyday will also have a profile of you.

Of course this is less true in denser areas

A hundred years ago the mail carrier couldn’t produce a list of every person that has ever sent a piece of mail to me.

Even to the naked eye, the scans often clearly show the contents of the envelope. With even a slight bit of basic image adjustment (we're talking brightness/contrast or levels) you can very clearly read what's inside.

Informed delivery was a game changer for me. Being able to decide in advance whether or not you absolutely need to fetch the mail saved me a few times.

Saved you from what?

From having to go get the mail when I was sick.

Package "lookahead" is the true gamechanger. Being able to see tracking information for inbound packages you don't have tracking numbers for directly is nice (because of the name/address matching stuff).

FOREX: I applied for a new passport and the passport status says "approved, we're mailing it soon" with no tracking information. Informed Delivery shows me the package coming from Arizona and where it is in the mailstream, even if the US State Department didn't give me my tracking number.

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