Let Google decide
cupofsquid.com
cupofsquid.com
The license thing had nothing to do with Google. The DMV doesn't use Google maps to mint licenses.
The po box thing also has nothing to do with Google. That's just a policy largely related to the bank secrecy act.
> For an entire week, I was a non-person to this country’s bureaucracy
It took a week to update their address. An out of date address doesn't make you a "non person." A handful of self-service online portals rejected their address change, and they couldn't use their po box for bank or license.
Here's the story,
"We moved to an extremely rural town. It's so off the grid, we had to go to the post office in person to get the address changed. Because we don't get mail at the house, me and my partner had to acknowledge that each of us lived there at the dmv. All in all, it took a week to sort out."
First, look up your address in the USPS ZIP Code retrieval system.[1] If it's in there, the USPS knows where you are. If your address isn't listed, "contact the local Post Office and request their assistance in resolving the problem." They can submit updates to the database. Once that entry is right, if anyone questions your address, point them at USPS ZIP Code Lookup.
I've had to do some of this. I live at the end of a private street where the neighbors put up a street sign, in a ZIP code that crosses a city line, next to a road easement for an un-built road. USPS, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the County of San Mateo all got this right. The official data is correct.
Open Street Map, Google, and the low-end GPS systems used by delivery drivers had problems. I had to log into Open Street Map, which had my street and the next street confused. Fixed that. Gradually, this propagated to Doordash, UPS, FedEx, etc. It took about a year before Tom-Tom updated, and I used to get calls from lost Doordash drivers. Putting up large high-quality house numbers on the house and gatepost also helped.
Never had any problems with banks, voting, taxes, or anything official. Only low-end service providers.
Also some companies like mine don't accept these PO box addresses because the some carriers we use can't deliver to it.
I’m lucky enough (like maybe most people voluntarily in my position) to have family that can support me with this. But what about the others? And other people who aren’t doing this voluntarily? It’s all held together with a wink and a nod when you just have to put something down.
Unfortunately, I don’t see it changing any time soon. The unhoused isn’t a strong lobbying block. Not to mention the difficulty in voting in this situation. I get not being able to vote on municipal issues if this status was legally recognized, but surely I should have a say in state (California won’t let my “citizenship” and associated taxes go easily) and national politics.
For the reasons listed in the article, it’s probably only going to get worse. Bummer.
There are additional issues.. like say getting served a jury summons
Having a registered address is a bit of clunky solution to a host of problems.
I've lived a decade abroad and I honestly often have zero understanding of my legal status in the US. I can sort of figure out my status with the IRS - but for instance, am I still a resident of California? (the last state I lived in) Can I vote for state issues there? Can I renew my driver's license there? Do I need to pay taxes there?
Am I stateless and have no way to get a license to use when I go back for Christmas? It's all a weird vague greyzone. For instance I have a license registered with a family member's address.. but I ignore jury summons entirely
Obligatory IANAL.
My layman understanding is that that generally is the case; you are a resident of the last State you resided in prior to becoming an expat.
Most people get around this by asking a friend or family member to use their address. This probably isn't completely legal, but it's not like there are problems significant enough that arise from this that someone in government would actually care.
To use a somewhat similar situation, AFAIK at least some things tend to be defined when you have multiple homes, or live in multiple countries : there tend to be minimum durations for living somewhere that give you rights and/or duties.
Of course it's something harder to implement for true nomads, but some framework is already there. (And there's typically framework for nomads too already, though they historically do tend to be treated as very low class. As a fun fact, the concept of identity papers comes in large part from factory owners which tried to prevent otherwise nomad workers to flee bad working conditions.)
I know there are homeless resources you can use as a physical address to receive mail like this when trying to re-establish your life. My SO and one of my friends both work with orgs in this space. It's not nearly as fast as some might like, but it isn't in the end all that difficult at all.
As an aside, if anyone still has faith in this electoral system, or any institution in America for that matter, I don't think they're adequately prepared for the Kafkaesque chaos that's about to become commonplace, if it hasn't already.
But not having a bank account for authentication or a phone number for many things is a disaster. Banks are mandated to give free basic banking services for everybody though, and a prepaid number is OK.
But in UK for example not having a utility bill with your name on it is a disaster.
Do those banks insist on having an iOS/Android smartphone ?
And no smartphone required for banks, at least all of them. Authentication can be done with a password and a list of passcodes from the bank.
We've had to add certain protections against people fraudulently registering themselves at your address, however. But I don't think sending mail to the address is involved.
Your domicile can be a family member's or friend's residence, or you can pay a company to provide you with that service ("Commercial Mail Handling Agent").
I "lived" in a mail cubicle of a service provider company for some 3 years, while driving around the country in a motorhome.
For bank KYC rules, the bank's automation may recognize and refuse prominent companies like that, much like they refuse PO boxes. A human may sometimes override that decision. That's unrelated to definition of domicile, and banks will generally also accept KYC information for a family member instead. Or you plan ahead and get KYC'ed before you move into non-traditional domicile situation.
How does the author know this bit?
I've lived on streets that definitely existed in Google maps, but where the exact address definitely didn't exist in USPS address system for like 6 months until they finally updated it, which caused... a very similar same set of issues described in this article. This has happened to me twice.
In my experience at least, USPS doesn't give a shit what Google says or not. Maybe it's changed since then? I would require some serious convincing though.
They cannot know it, strictly speaking, because it is false. The USPS is legally required to deliver to every address. They certainly don’t depends on Google maps for compliance, or use it as a source of truth.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BigIsland/comments/12nbw4i/til_that...
What if there is no address?
The house where I grew up was very rural, it had no address and USPS definitely did not deliver anything there.
The only address we had until my 20s was my father's work office, that's where we received all mail.
(That doesn't mean you'll be able to receive mail at that address.)
In the USA these sorts of issues may be troublesome to a small fraction of the people so that government and business can largely ignore it without it inconveniencing too many people, but in India it’s sheer madness. So you know what happens instead? You just don’t deal with the dodgy phone app or website, but instead ring the company’s local agent, or go into the company’s shop, or something like that, and they bypass their broken system. Exactly the same as the conclusion of this article.
India’s digitalisation of things is frequently very half-baked. Maybe the end state in another twenty years will be worthwhile, but in the mean time, things are often worse than they were before the attempt was made.
Mr. So-and-so
Third house on the right, past the old tree
Near government building #5
Smalltown, Kerala
And then we’d do cash-on-delivery payments to these addresses. And it worked! I always imagined working for the Indian postal service would be interesting every day.
If you’re the Post Office, maybe you have access to actual data (not sure), but if you’re some other kind of deliverer, you definitely don’t (there isn’t any publicly available—and even the best commercial ones are completely useless in many places), and only local knowledge will help you.
https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/
(There are some arguments that Statism is actually a positive development, however it at least also has very nasty failure modes like Police State, and/or the situation where a few companies, shielded from democratic control, own everything.)
P.S.: HN discussion of the above : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20400656
P.P.S.: https://www.dw.com/en/german-town-votes-no-to-street-names/a...
Here they show an app where you just make your order to your current location. Which I guess would make sense if Addresses are a mess, no address needed just a GPS location.
Can you give some examples and contrast those with the US?
FWIW, address-to-map-location and directions in India can be unreliable on Google Maps, and are borderline useless on Apple Maps.
There ought to be laws about digital options being removed first in these situations, at least where government or businesses that operate infrastructure (like delivery companies) are concerned. (Strong laws, some laws for this already exist, but they tend to be weak and/or do not last long, since they go against the tendency of the state to grab ever more power.)
> Because of Google, our address wasn’t even present for the USPS
In fact, USPS has its own database of addresses which Google most certainly solicits their data from. I know because I have dealt with customers who have found the same issue. We urge anyone with this issue to direct the issue to the USPS Address Management System Offices to file their address. Other services like those from Auctane (ShipStation, ShipEngine) references this data too.
https://postalpro.usps.com/ppro-tools/address-management-sys...
Ultimately, according to this postmodern ethos, reality is mediated by power and consensual narrative; therefore, despite your individual lived experience, the fact that Google does not recognize your existence at this address makes your nonexistence and nonresidence actually the case, because Google has the social gravitas to assert its own view of the world as actually factual.
If one finds this state of affairs as intolerable as the author of TFA, in which one can definitely inhabit an address despite there being no record of it in the Akashic cyberrecords, then one had best discover how to demonstrate the absurdity and undesirability of said postmodern philosophy.
Instead, if you scroll down, they themselves have a Github account !
It's a bit like a doctor complaining about the prevalence of lung cancer, while themselves chain-smoking in their own practice, during patient consultations.
What a weird rant at the end. Last I checked, there is no gender.google.com, and straight up erasing people from maps for their race/gender/ethics/whatever is not something I have heard of happening.
> Research in Philadelphia by sociologist Jackelyn Hwang shows that gentrification not only shifts the demographics of a given area, but leads to divergent definitions of neighborhoods.
> Minority residents were more likely to call a wide area one neighborhood, named “South Philly.” White residents, by contrast, divided the same area into multiple neighborhoods, such as “Graduate Hospital,” “G-Ho,” “So-So,” “South Rittenhouse,” “South Square” and “Southwest Center City,” splitting up areas by their socioeconomic characteristics and crime levels.
> In such cases, the use of different neighborhood definitions served to legitimize one’s presence in a community. Neighborhoods do this by evoking a sense of place for residents, describing a relationship that the place has with someone’s biography, imagination and personal experiences. The names create boundaries between those who are perceived to belong to these communities – and those who do not.
- https://finance-commerce.com/2019/04/whats-driving-businesse...
(Of course greed, stupidity and laziness will cause us to use computers for all sorts of management decisions and we’ll destroy lives as a result.)
While the propane company's letter should have been sufficient, ultimately these kinds of realities are socially determined, so I don't think it's all that crazy to expect attestations from other people to substitute for other official documentation.
Also, the one big takeaway I had from this blog is that government entities should use a government-run maps application for official duties. At least then you have someone you can hold accountable (i.e. your congressional representative) for any errors that appear. Actually, maybe the author could reach out to their congressperson anyways. If the USPS has a contract with Google to use Maps, they could in theory require a redress mechanism as part of the next contract.
Edit: I say this because pretending it’s the “white, heteronormative, cisgender” crowd in the Bay Area oppressing everyone unlike them in… rural America of all places is hilarious. If anything this entire article is evidence of the opposite given the relative demographics of each.
* Google's autocomplete not having the address is different from USPS not having the address. It depends on who the bank was using as address verification. At least in my area, addresses are handled by the county road commission, and it cost money to apply for one. I believe there is more paperwork with the post office to then get mail delivered.
* PO Boxes are also not really a Google issue? A lot of places just don't accept PO Boxes. Using a mailbox service at a UPS is nicer for this reason. It looks like a normal address + number so it's usually accepted. Though you still can't use it to register for a driver's license, I was able to use one to register for a bank account, when I lived in a tiny home for a bit.
I still don't believe it; no evidence was presented.
"Proof of address" is a thorny problem. Mail is the obvious approach but quickly falls down in many cases. In many parts of the world official mail has all but ceased (web, email is cheaper.) In lots of areas PO boxes are used. Or, you know, Accounts may be in my wife's name so we don't get letters to me or my kids.
The Google part is fun, but basically irrelevant. There are new streets, new buildings, being built all the time. That might be your first hurdle, but it's not the last.
And that's before we talk about folks who don't have an address at all. Live in your car (or RV) - good luck with that.
You'll be shocked, shocked, to discover that this has had precisely no effect on money laundering... but hey, war on crime right?
A few banks allow you to change your address online, a digital statement will then show the updated address. A printout works around proof-of-address requirements.
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> On a larger scale, it made me concerned for the use of AI in these kinds of situations. What if I wasn’t able to intercept a human postmaster who could then look at my documents and say that I was able to have a PO Box to receive mail from outside of town?
GDPR Article 22:
> The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT0000... (fr)
To resume, it's an obligation to explain to citizens the administrative decisions taken concerning them with the help of an algorithm, and specifically to explain it in plain language, listing all the data used for it, and all the steps taken.
As you can imagine, it's not a request that can possibly be fulfilled in the case of a neural network, by which I can only conclude that the use of neural networks is itself illegal here.
But of course the state being sovereign, it doesn't really have to care about following its own laws if it doesn't really want to.
Also, what is particularly impressive in this case, is that the initial target of this law, the algorithm(s) behind the (now mandatory) college application platform, got at the last moment an exemption from it !
(There's also in parallel the question of the source code, the publication of which was promised, but only tiny parts of which have been - 7 years later - and now the new promise is "by 2029", under an excuse that is basically "security by obscurity".)
Or how the tax administration just went and started to use a neural network on private banking data anyway.
Or how Nice is experimenting illegally with neural network-helped video surveillance.
Or how Paris has "experimented" with neural network-helped video surveillance for the Olympic Games... will be very interesting to see what parts of this "experimentation" - that did specifically get in theory temporary legal exemptions - will stick around even after that period is over.
Google maps however: I was working on a tool to speed up filling addresses into a CRM using google autoccomplete/places, and basically found all the bugs I could just on my own address.
Autocomplete is just for suggestions as you type. Places API gives you distinct locations but you can take the id's from autocomplete and pass them to places to get full address info.
* Autocomplete and Places are not always in sync, so sometimes autocomplete gives you an place id that Places API no longer recognised and would 404. * Some place ids are sythesized, these usually work, but part of the address info is encoded in the ID and you can't guartee these id's will last. * My address would autocomplete "This Street East, Suburb" but the ID would give "This Street, East Suburb" a different street and suburb. * Any address with a Unit number: so every apartment building duplex etc, would Simple forget the Unit number on autocomplete. As google didn't a db of all the werid types of unit numbers we have in Australia it just accepted what you typed before the / (So there's different types of unit names: LOT, UNIT, SUITE etc but Australia post recommends only using this format: 5/2 where 5 is unit 2 is street number). Until you hit complete then it would just forget it. Then found it handles it even when the unit number isn't only digits. (eg 2a/21) * Completely confused if the address "Doesn't exist" yet. Our product was sometimes used for new buildings that wern't done yet and deliver address was for a street in a housing development. It got real confused then.
I could work around nearly all of these. But so many apps does it come up in that I have to fix or override (I've only ran into one site that refused to accept my address with a Google lookup).
Worst cases is however. Tried ordering meds through an app: it sends the script to a Chemist near you and orders through doordash. I can see on my order the correct address in the Chemist app. I get a call from the doordash guy saying there's no unit number and sure enough the doordash status page doesn't have the unit number (and the location marking is wrong, which I assume is related) A second time i order fast food through the companies website, as their menulog was disabled. And that also ended up on doordash and ran into the same probrlem (and the person just left the food at a random fire exit of my building)
My street name is officially an abbreviation, but half of the map services have it with the full name, which makes sense in some way and makes it easier to search, but it's not the legal name of the street.
So if a website auto-fills from map service, I usually need to try both versions until one works.
Apple used to have the full version until I sent them a report; now they fixed it in Maps, but I still have it wrong in my "home address" and I have no idea how to fix it there.
It's not really that big of a deal though. But yeah as OP says, AI will make sorting out this stuff harder, not easier