> Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change.
This doesn't sound good for privacy or security, though it's a nice convenience function.
> Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change.
This doesn't sound good for privacy or security, though it's a nice convenience function.
This idea is so close to being great though. It just needs a couple changes:
> Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
1. The site shouldn’t get your address at all. They print the code on the package, mail it to Japan Post, and Japan Post takes care of delivering it to you.
2. You should be able to generate new codes arbitrarily.
i.e. A service like Apple’s Hide My Email, but for physical mail.
Japan Post represents only a portion of shipping providers in Japan, for our idea to work others will need the same privileged access to the system: Yamato, Sagawa etc.
This will also require to alter the package label on the last mile because requiring the courier to scan every package or letter before they could even see an apartment number will slow things down to a crawl.
The relabeling to show the actual address is something that carriers are already doing for C2C marketplaces and their anonymous shipping features already.
It would be pretty trivial to mark some addresses as private. So only the delivery service can resolve it.
My guess is that's already planned, but they don't put all details in the first press release.
The "important notes" section on the Japanese page[1] says that you can disable / delete an address at any time and create a new one. If I used this I would rotate every so often and at a minimum for each move. I'm a bit concerned for people that don't understand the risks of updating these. Anyone that's ever seen this code being able to lookup the person's address across moves is scary. I don't feel like this convenience warrants the risk of having this feature, personally. It's already convenient enough to just limit the input required for updating third parties to an alphanumeric code without allowing updating the addresses.
[1]: https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/#importantnotes