By Greg Anderson, (ISC)² Associate is an emerging cybersecurity professional with an interest in digital privacy.
The U.S. Postal Service is in trouble. It’s $63 billion dollars in debt, and is expected to lose another $160 billion over the coming decade. Lawmakers are scratching their heads about how to pull it out of its deepening hole. Ideas to expand USPS revenue streams include offering check-cashing services, utility bill payments and selling bonds.
What about something more innovative? To offer a more contemporary service, USPS can borrow an idea from the big tech playbook. Here’s how it would work: the postal service would open every letter they receive, read through it, and take note of any important details. For instance, the reunion in Boston this summer which you mentioned in a birthday card to your friend, the spike in energy use on this month’s utility bill, the results of your recent blood labs showing that your iron is low. Since most of us don’t get as much mail nowadays, they’d also open all of our packages, inspect the contents to see what we’ve ordered, and keep track of our shopping habits too.
The USPS can then build a profile about each person and sell these profiles to advertising companies. How convenient would it be if Delta mailed you a limited-time deal on your upcoming trip to Boston, if window companies sent you brochures with energy-efficient options to lower your utility bill, or if Blue Apron customized a meal plan for your iron deficiency? By knowing details about our personal lives, the USPS can create individual profiles to target advertising and in turn, companies can better provide us with the things that we want. The potential is huge. In 2021, Google generated over $209 billion in advertising revenue, and Facebook made nearly $115 billion. If the USPS can earn a small fraction of these figures, it can cover its losses and even turn a profit.
Unfortunately for the USPS, this proposal likely wouldn’t make it very far. We wouldn’t tolerate having our documents and packages opened and surveilled, only to have companies target us with products they think we’d like. Or would we? We’ve given email providers permission to handle our messages exactly this way, only that the absence of physically tearing open an envelope makes the practice easy to swallow. George Orwell’s 1984 tells of a society where “by a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit.” The situation today is no secret either. Google collects emails you write and receive, and may use this information to provide advertising to you. Yahoo analyzes and stores your incoming and outgoing mail, which they use to deliver relevant advertising. Microsoft does not use emails to target advertising to you, but they don’t state whether they use your emails to build a general profile about your habits.
But a little surveillance doesn’t hurt, right? After all, these companies provide email to us for free, and advertising is the means to achieve this end. The reality is far from a break-even deal. Google’s $209 billion ad revenue equates to almost $45 earned per internet user worldwide, assuming every single one uses Google’s services - which is not unlikely, considering Google has trackers on over 85% of high-traffic websites.
While the USPS is unlikely to adopt business practices from the tech giants, Google isn’t afraid to use ideas from the postal service, at least as portrayed in 1984:
“For the messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable.”
Postcards have been rendered obsolete by email, so instead of striking out inapplicable phrases, we now click the applicable ones that Google suggests with Gmail’s Smart Reply feature. Typing out a sentence or two on our own isn’t worth the effort when we can simply tap “Great, thanks for the update!” as Gmail thoughtfully recommends.
The USPS has yet to offer free delivery services. If that day ever comes, we’ll know it’s at a much greater cost than the few dollars we’ve saved. It’s time that we start looking the same way at the true cost of free email.