Ever wonder how sometimes digital ads know what you’re discussing in the privacy of your own home…and even sometimes what you’re thinking? 

Well, here’s one part of that answer, we’re sure. An investigation from TechCrunch has revealed that the U.S. Postal Service was sharing the addresses of its online customers with tech giants like Meta and LinkedIn. 

On Wednesday, the USPS announced it had stopped sharing customers’ information through hidden data-collecting code, claiming it was previously unaware of the practice.

TechCrunch discovered that the USPS was using tracking pixels on its website, which tech and advertising companies use to gather user information, such as visited pages.

For USPS, this data included postal addresses of logged-in Informed Delivery customers, who use the service to preview photos of their incoming mail, the report said.

In a statement, the USPS said: “The Postal Service leverages an analytics platform for our own internal purposes, so that we understand the usage of our products and services and which we use on an aggregated basis to market our products.”

It continued: “The Postal Service does not sell or provide any personal information that is collected from this analytics platform to any third party, and we were unaware of any configuration of the platform that collected personal information from the URL and that shared it without our knowledge with social media.” 

“We have taken immediate action to remediate this issue.”

A spokesperson for Facebook commented: “We’ve been clear in our policies that advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools. Doing so is against our policies, and we educate advertisers on properly setting up Business Tools to prevent this from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.”

TechCrunch found that the USPS website shared logged-in users’ postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn, and Snap. This was revealed by analyzing network traffic. The USPS site scraped and sent customers’ addresses and other data, including computer and browser information, to these companies. Although this data was partially pseudonymized, it can still potentially identify individuals.

Tracking numbers entered on the USPS site were shared with advertisers like Bing, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snap, including real-time location data of mail, even without user login.

The extent of the data collection remains unclear, but Informed Delivery had over 62 million users as of March 2024.