Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Let's say your address was

256 Main St. Apt 10, Some City, CA, USA

I usually provide my address as

256 Main St. Unit 10-BCRK, Some City, CA, USA

I generate a unique code for each entity that I am required to provide my address to.

I usually change "Apt" to "Unit" to stump the automatic address-correcting APIs that will convert "Apt 10-BCRK" to "Apt 10". I found that changing "Apt" to "Unit" usually stumps them.

The idea is that if I see another business use "BCRK" to send me junk mail, or list my address on those idiot people search sites, I will write a blog and publicly shame the first business for giving it out.

Package delivery drivers happily ignore the "BCRK" part and my packages still arrive as usual.

When giving out billing address for credit card authorization, I find usually I can skip the apartment number field and the card still authorizes just fine, so I also don't need to tell online retailers the same 4-letter code that my bank has listed for my address.

This is a great idea and I would like to use it. However, I have only the house number and street address. What can I do in that case?

PS: I generate separate emails already. Example: somebusiness@mydomain.com However, I have not found a single case where they leaked my email address, so I am not sure if it helps for spam and privacy.

I imagine you could just still just use "Unit XYZ" or whatever.

If it confuses your delivery folks and it's the same people every day, just explain it to them to ignore that, but most likely they'll just ignore the Unit stuff and leave the package at your door as usual.

I do the separate-email thing too and my spambox is chock full of emails to leaked addresses. The leaks seem mostly from large, upstanding companies that have had data breaches (Adobe, Myspace, ...), rather than from deliberate email address sales. It's still very handy to be able to just disable an email address... can't do that if you've used the same registration email on 1000 sites.

I separate emails, a different address for each company/organisation I deal with. Since I started in 2002, I have found multiple instances of leaked or sold email addresses. My Dropbox one was leaked for sure, as that was quite public, and some of the others seem sold, as the companies seem a bit fly-by-night (of course that may also mean they're clueless about security). One reputable-seeming one I contacted about it claimed they hadn't had a data breach, which I think probably just means they weren't aware of it. I've also had an address scraped and then copied manually from a classified ad - they left out the first letter when they copied and pasted, but I still get it since I have a catch-all!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com