Years ago, I used to write holiday cards for all of my coworkers. I would hand write the card and leave it on their desks. Now, in the age of Covid, we are all working from home. This presents a problem. How can I get everyone their holiday cards? I don’t have their addresses and generally that is considered personal information. In other words, people don’t want to give out their home address to their coworkers.
The Idea
What we need are Home Address Aliases. I think this has to be run out of the Federal Post Office system. You would go to the Post Office website and register for one of these aliases. You put in your home address and it gives you a code, like 12345-ABCDEF. Then every person sending mail could send to that code instead of your actual home address. When you move you would need to update the USPS site with your new address.
This is a simple idea. There aren’t alot of moving parts.
Optional add-ons
One time use codes could be generated so you could give a website your one time code and no one else. This is similar to how credit cards allow you to have one-time use numbers to protect your account.
You could also have controls on your different codes. Imagine one code that is specifically for packages and another for junk mail. Personally, I can’t stand the amount of junk mail I get every day. There is no way to get rid of it.
Summary
When we all work from home, we need new privacy protections. This kind of alias is only viable from the Post Office. You can’t have a startup for this. All of my mail goes through them.
The government does amazing things for us and the Post Office is probably the best example of this wonderful public service. I hope that people can learn about how the government is so useful and fund it properly.
Whatya think?