When you fill out the online form to change an address, you can indicate a temporary change that provides six months of forwarding that can then be extended for another six months. There is, however, a loophole that keeps data brokers from accessing your updated address. Because data brokers have every household in America in their files, the information goes from NCOA to the data brokers, who flag every change and resell lists of new movers to anyone. Supposedly, you only get a new address if you have the old address already.
MOVING MAIL FORWARD LICENSE
“USPS justifies the program on the grounds that they don't ‘sell’ the list but license its use. That is a subterfuge. NCOA is a prime source of this information.” “New movers are fodder for data brokers, who sell mailing lists to marketers and who also maintain lifetime files on every household in America. “There's nothing terrible about NCOA, but people should be given a choice,” says Bob Gellman, a privacy expert who worked for many years as a Congressional subcommittee staff member. Members of Congress have from time to time proposed creating an opt-out option, but to date such initiatives have failed. If you want to forward your mail, the USPS does not offer an option to opt out of sharing the data, or even paying for the privilege of opting out.
Other companies incorporate the information into their comprehensive dossiers on almost all Americans (one leader in the field, Acxiom, recently said it would allow consumers to see their individual dossiers for the first time from the end of the summer).
MOVING MAIL FORWARD UPDATE
Prices vary a few I looked at charge around $1,000 to update one million address records.
Licensees in turn sell that data to direct marketers.
MOVING MAIL FORWARD FULL
population moves every year, and that the sale of new addresses to data brokers saves the postal service money by reducing the amount of mail they have to forward to new addresses.Īmong those buying full licenses are some of the country’s most prominent data brokers including Acxiom, Epsilon, FICO, Harte Hanks, InfoUSA, Merkle and KBM Group. Last fall, that’s where I met Bob Eide, an affable direct mail specialist who has been with the postal service since 1973. When the Direct Marketing Association holds its annual convention, the USPS sets up a large stand to pitch the service in a giant hall alongside the country’s biggest data brokers. The Postal Service lost nearly $16 billion in fiscal year 2012, then another $3.1 billion in the first half of fiscal 2013. " This amount does not include the savings to the mailing industry for wasted postage, production costs, and lost customers." "The ability to update customer address information through NCOALink has been previously estimated to save the USPS and the postal rate payer in excess of $1 billion annually," he said, referring to what they call undeliverable-as-addressed mail. But the program results in big savings by avoiding additional cost of forwarding mail. The Postal Service makes about $8 million a year licensing its change of address data, according to James Wilson, the USPS manager of address management. The post office also sells cheaper licenses with 18 months of data. “Mailers submit their address lists directly to these commercial data processors who update the information and return to the mailer.”Ī full license with four years of data costs $190,000. “Either weekly or monthly we distribute an updated file of change-of-address data to the licensed companies,” Betts said. Today they license to about 500 companies, he said.
That change allowed the postal service to distribute the address changes more widely. After complaints about privacy violations, they reformatted the data to assure only those with the former address could obtain the new information, according to spokesman Roy Betts. Until 2002, the USPS licensed to just 22 companies. The Postal Service set up its current National Change of Address program, sometimes abbreviated as NCOA, in 1986.
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