Like everyone, we get a quite a bit of junk mail at our house. Some of it comes to "current resident", others target us by name. Broadly speaking it breaks into two groups. Things that are either geotargeted. (In my neighborhood, that would include ads such as "Why don't you lease a car through Uber and pay for it by driving!") and those that are more personally targeted (think credit card offers).
Today we got an interesting one. It was an offer to try Blue Apron. If we lived in Palo Alto, I'd chalk it up to geotargeting rich neighborhoods, but we don't live in one. Also, it came to wife who posts recipes on Facebook. It's enough to make us wonder if Blue Apron is somehow linking Facebook targeting data with real world names and addresses. Now I don't know if it's true, but if it is, that's creepy as fuck. That's autodoxing.
Germany has a law which allows you to adblock your mailbox. If you put a sticker on sayin 'no advertisements', you can sue any company that puts material without your name on it in.
Curious: How would companies that mail things to you know that there is a sticker on your (physical) mailbox?
Or do you mean that random companies are allowed to put things into your mailbox? In the US, only the US Postal Service is allowed to put things into your mailbox - not even FedEx or UPS are allowed to use it.
There are companies using the postal service to send advertisements such as catalogs to all households in an area. If the mail does not have your name on it (no name, or something like 'to the residents of your address') they can't put it in.
That holds for other random companies too. It's allowed in general to put paper in mailboxes I think, especially local businesses such as take-out food places do it occasionally.
Today we got an interesting one. It was an offer to try Blue Apron. If we lived in Palo Alto, I'd chalk it up to geotargeting rich neighborhoods, but we don't live in one. Also, it came to wife who posts recipes on Facebook. It's enough to make us wonder if Blue Apron is somehow linking Facebook targeting data with real world names and addresses. Now I don't know if it's true, but if it is, that's creepy as fuck. That's autodoxing.