USPS Must Die

[paserbyp]

You probably think of the United States Postal Service as a chronically underfunded, increasingly expensive, frustratingly glacial service trying to fend off the final KO from FedEx and UPS. But there’s another way that your postal experience has been ens–ttified over the last several decades: MyMove, the site USPS sends you to when you need to change your address—instead of just filling out a postcard or going to a post office in person(More details: https://www.wired.com/story/the-governments-shittiest-website).

MyMove is a private company that has held an exclusive contract to run USPS's online change-of-address and voter registration services for over 30 years. It’s supposed to be a win-win for the government: It doesn't spend a dime, while MyMove shares some of the money it makes by selling your new address to advertisers. For the 24 million people who move every year, the firm has turned the experience of an address change into an online hell of unskippable ads, deceptive button placements, and other internet “dark patterns” designed to ensure you can check out any time you like but can never leave. It’s also the reason your mailbox fills with junk before you’ve even unpacked your kitchen utensils.

If you try to register to vote through the site, it’ll redirect you to page after page of Xfinity internet plans and home security offers with no skip button in sight. At the end of this gauntlet of advertisements for unwanted products, it sends an email—telling you to print out a form, fill it out, and physically mail it.

In 1997, the “inventor of the internet” himself praised this kind of public-private partnership as an example of government innovation. But a whistleblower alleged in 2020 that MyMove was skimming the USPS’s cut by secretly deducting its own costs first. Your tax dollars didn’t pay for this service — but maybe they should have or maybe better just to do privatization of USPS and kill it in XXI century?