I scanned an envelope which had a dot matrix 4-state barcode by the postal service. It did not appear on the /bilevel/ scan. So I tried very low thresholds (the point at which light gray is treated as either black or white). The threshold needed to retain the fluorescent(†) barcode is so low that black text on the same scan becomes too dirty for OCR to work.
The US postal service scans (all?) envelopes and thus has records of who is sending mail to who. (Do other countries do this?) Anyway, I wonder how we might counter the privacy intrusion. What if the return address on an envelope is printed in fluorescent orange.. would the return address be suppressed from envelope scans? IIUC, they would have to scan in grayscale or color to capture it, which would take a lot more storage space. So they are probably doing bitonal scans. Yellow would work too but it’s much harder for an eye to see. This fluorescent orange is readable enough to a human eye but apparently tricky for a machine.
Of course the return address is optional, so the best privacy is to simply not supply a return address. But if return service is wanted, supplying a return address is inherently needed.
Another thought: suppose an address is dark blue text on a light blue background, or white text on a medium blue background. The scanning software would have to be quite advanced to choose a threshold that treats the text differently than the background, no? If the return address is fluorescent orange and the destination address has a background color, envelopes could perhaps be printed in a way that stifles the mass surveillance.
(†) I cannot concretely assert that it is fluorescent; just describing what it looks like.
For return service, indeed. In that very rare event, they would have to hand enter it just as they do for hand-written addresses.
Your sympathy is backwards though. Postal workers’s job security is under threat currently as people move away from postal service. Denmark eliminates postal service for the whole country this year.
(update) Also, other countries are downgrading the postal service and cutting staff in the drive toward digital transformation.
I would assume it gets entered into the system when they process it initially not when they need to return it.
That would not make economic sense. Why would they hand-enter grandma’s chicken scratch hand-written return address when it is not needed for outbound routing? Anyone wasting money like that is not competent for their job.
Just finding the return address takes time in itself. It could be on the top left, or it could be a one-liner just above the destination address, or it could be on the backside, or not even supplied. They should only be looking for it when it is needed.
It’s fair to assume in this case USPS is not that incompetently wasteful. But if they are, then that incompetence is the problem (not how we choose to address our envelopes).
Your logic is off-target, as this is caused by "management", not the individual.
No. It isn't.
The USPS is being intentionally mismanaged as a step towards dismantling the pillars of US government.
It is management that I was referring to. That should be obvious. The incompetence belongs to whoever makes the incompetent decision, which in this case would be high in upper management.
A safe assumption need not be an accurate assumption. It’s about consequences. Incompetence has consequences -- and rightfully so. IOW, when the assumption is wrong, it does not obviate the purpose of my action. Therefore the assumption is safe.