Mailing address aliasing as a method to protect consumer privacy
Greg Hather, Daniel Aranki
TL;DR
The paper investigates privacy risks from sharing residential addresses in online commerce and proposes mailing address aliasing as a low-cost privacy-preserving alternative in which an alias maps to the true address and is accessible to the carrier but hidden from the merchant. The approach aims to maintain home delivery with minimal infrastructure changes by leveraging carrier-side alias generation and a private address mapping, potentially including time-limited validity and an address manager. The authors analyze implementation costs, compare aliasing to existing options like PO boxes and virtual mailboxes, and discuss incentives and obstacles for adoption, highlighting that success depends on carrier support and merchant compatibility. They also outline future work, including consumer interest studies, merchant readiness assessments, and development of a proof-of-principle alias generation tool to explore broader applicability and impact on unsolicited mail and data-sharing practices.
Abstract
During online commerce, a customer will typically share his or her mailing address with a merchant to allow product delivery. This creates privacy risks for the customer, where the information may be misused, sold, or leaked by multiple merchants. While physical and virtual PO boxes can reduce the privacy risk, these solutions have associated costs that prevent greater adoption. Here, we introduce the concept of mailing address aliasing, which may offer lower cost and greater control in some cases. With this approach, an alias address is created that maps to the customer's true address. The mapping is kept private from the merchant but shared with the carrier. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this approach compared with traditional methods for mailing address privacy. We find that mailing address aliasing is likely to reduce unsolicited mail to a greater extent than physical or virtual PO boxes. However, mailing address aliasing may not be compatible with all merchants' ordering systems.