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How the USPS Killed Digital Mail
An anonymous reader writes "In 2013, a startup called Outbox drew a lot of attention for its ambitious goal: digitizing everybody's snail mail. It was a nice dream; no more walking down your driveway six days a week to clear out the useless junk it contained. But less than a year later, Outbox shut down. This article explains how the United States Postal Service swiftly crushed their plan to make mail better. The founders were summoned to a meeting with the Postmaster General, who told them. 'We have a misunderstanding. You disrupt my service and we will never work with you. You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.' The USPS's Chief of Digital Strategy said Outbox's business model 'will never work anyway. Digital is a fad.' The USPS wouldn't work with Outbox to forward customers' mail, and that eventually destroyed the business."
Not entirely true. While they don't collect funds collected via taxes, they also don't PAY taxes on many things, like say property taxes for their offices, sorting facilities, etc. So they indirectly are Government funded, at the state and municipality level.
That is an outright lie. The USPS has NEVER failed to meet retirement fund contributions and has never been in the situation you describe. The reality is Congress required the USPS to PREPAY 75 YEARS worth of retirement over 10 years. They are being forced to put retirement funds in for employees that have NOT even been born and under the assumption that they will grow employment at 3% per annum for those years. This requirement also does NOT allow the USPS to reduce hours, post offices, delivery or increase stamp prices. It's a deliberate attempt to fool idiots like you into thinking the most efficient business in the US is a failure so the people will allow congress to sell the USPS to fedex and ups for major kickbacks to the republicans. Without that utterly stupid retirement prefunding requirement the USPS was in the black almost 100 million dollars last year.
Since they are the delivery mechanism, they need to pay attention to the metadata.
There is a difference betwen your bank, your doctor, or your ISP having information about you and the NSA having this information.
...and since the USPS has performed the latter function (providing images of the exterior of literally every piece of mail to other government agencies, since the 1970's), then it seems quite obvious they have transcended their need for the metadata.
Seriously, this is called the "mail covers program", and you can read the New York Times article about it from last year. Oh, and FYI, each of those square barcodes you see on modern stamps printed by the APC (i.e. that ATM thing in the USPS lobby) has a unique serial code that is tied to your credit card and a picture of you that was taken by the APC. Obviously, that's available to other government agencies too.
Enjoy the land of the free and the home of the brave!