Junk Mail, Explained

when i get home from work tonight a thick pile of mail will be waiting for me i wasn't look this just arrived in my mailbox i don't know what's in here i i maybe there could be a letter from my grandma there could be a an important tax document maybe my driver's license renewal came through and it's in here i have no idea unless i sift through every bit of this paper to find it and that makes me mad it really makes me mad and that's why that's why i'm here same thing applies to my phone i get 10 calls a day from robots someone has access to me to my eyes my attention and i never gave them permission to have that access hello hello most of the time they just hang up too much of my life is spent sifting through information that i don't want to look at and that's a frustrating fact you know you could do a buy one get one free of dial soap this week it's pretty cool i'm tired i am tired of corporations having access to my personal attention which is already fleeting and fractured and split between a million things it's like i don't want these guys adding more to that so i am going on a quest to rid my life of junk mail in all forms yeah i'd like to cancel my mail certainly how long would you like us to hold it i went out permanently i'll handle this violet it is a journey that has taken me down some really weird paths all over the internet talking to robocall people learning about this crazy shadowy industry of people who sell and buy your information but before i can really rid my life of junk mail i have to understand where this all came from how does this industry work and how does all of this stuff end up in my life and that's what this video is about buckle up the avalanche of junk mail is more than just an annoyance i get so much junk mail it's unbelievable they have a list of every mailing address in the united states everybody works in a post office as an alien okay let me just start off by saying i'm not angry at all advertising i'm fine with most advertising in fact my job relies on advertising you probably watched a pre-roll ad before watching this video to help pay my bills okay in fact advertising has allowed a lot of really wonderful things on the internet you can read the news for free because of advertising all of your social media activity is sponsored by the ads that pass by you and i'm fine with that there are so many different ways companies try to get your attention so that you will buy their product and most of these i'm totally fine with but i draw a really important line here on this side i will call the public space advertising all of the things that come into your purview when you are sort of on someone else's space you're either driving down the road or you're scrolling on a free website or you're reading the news for free or you're scrolling your social feed or you're watching a free video on youtube this is sort of a consensual exchange where you're saying i'm going to use this service and in exchange i'm willing to be served ads okay that's like seems like really fair if you don't like it you don't have to use the service but there's a red line here and on this side of the red line are three sacred spaces my mailbox my phone and my email inbox my phone is where like my mom calls me or where i have conversations with my sister or my close friends it's direct access to like my pocket it is a very personal space my mailbox is again a personal space it's at my physical home where i live not everyone should have access to that thing that is attached to my house without my consent and then of course my email my email is where i do my job it's where i communicate with the people who are closest to me i don't want just anyone to be able to appear at will in my inbox so those are the three spaces that i consider sacred all other advertising and marketing i'm totally down with i have no issues with but unfortunately these three spaces are the holy grail for advertisers you probably know that it's really a numbers game it's all about sending out just as many mail pieces as you can to almost sort of force people to notice the mail piece what this form of advertising is called the stuff i have problems with it's called direct advertising this is the type of marketing that aims to get right in front of a human being in their most personal spaces so today you have these massive companies that you've never heard about that spend day and night scraping every piece of information from the entire world that they can get that has to do with you and your behavior your interests where you live how you consume things where you shop what your income level is and they go to really great lengths to do this sometimes they buy it from companies who you've done some sort of transaction with or sometimes they'll go to public records like real estate records to see when was the last time you bought a house driver's license records voting registration even the census can be used to profile certain neighborhoods and what they do is they take a bunch of these profiles and they put it onto a giant list and then they can sell this list so if i'm geico and i want to run a marketing campaign i'm going to buy a big list from one of these data brokers i can say with a pretty firm certainty that every person watching this video has an extensive profile on one of these lists that is owned by these big data brokerages that you've never heard of and this information is being bought and sold every day to large companies it's a very lucrative industry but wait i thought there's been all this stuff in the news about how like we're tightening up privacy and like the mismanagement of data and like tech companies are being cracked down on and isn't this all tightening up and our data is actually more protected than ever yes but but actually no oh i'm really behind the eight ball mac the mail doesn't stop bud you smoking now let's use an example that has to do with an app i use a lot doordash doordash is a meal delivery app when you sign up you give them your address and your telephone number and all the information they need to know to deliver you food i'm fine with that but as you get ready to actually sign up of course you see this familiar box of terms of use and privacy statement no one reads that i don't read that until i decided to read it and see what's going on what's doordash doing with all this information you'll see that doordash can use your data to serve you ads again i'm fine with that it's like go ahead track my behavior and cater ads to me i'm totally okay with that but what you don't realize when you're using doordash is that all of this data of your behavior and everything that's linked to you is also being tracked by a bunch of other third-party apps that doordash has baked into their app but here's the thing doordash promises in its privacy statement that they will never take my data and all this information and sell it to the big bad data brokers but wait go down a little further and you see that they wash their hands of responsibility of what these third-party apps do with your data and they suggest that you go read the privacy statement of those third parties those nine different companies that are taking my data all have privacy statements and they want me to go read each one of them and oh by the way i have no way of knowing who those companies are or what data they're collecting total nightmare those companies could easily be taking all of this data they have free rein on and selling it to the highest bidder and it would still be within the terms of use and the privacy statement of doordash let's just pause here for a second and let me remind you that again i don't necessarily have a problem with people knowing that i like sushi if it just means i'm gonna get more tailored ads when i'm like scrolling through facebook that's fine it doesn't necessarily violate my redline the big problem here and where it starts to get into my red line is that all of this data eventually will make it to a data broker who will add it to my big profile suddenly they know i like sushi and before you know it more of this is arriving on my doorstep that's where it crosses my red line and that's why i'm frustrated that they're not actually making anyone stand accountable for what they do with my data what i'm about to talk about is where it starts to get egregious and actually makes my blood boil a little bit and that has to do with the united states postal service the postal service is prohibited from selling or renting mailing lists they have their own statute on this besides the privacy act now i don't know how this works in other countries and honestly i would love to know but you know the swiss uh postal service will actually ask you do you want this junk mail delivered and if you don't they'll keep it for you and they'll recycle it but i'm just gonna explain how it works here and hope that this isn't the case everywhere else the postal service promises me on their website that they would never sell my personal information they're a freaking government agency like they're not they shouldn't be selling where i live thank you postal service that is the respectful thing to do in fact there's actually a law in the united states that says the postal service can't exploit my personal information by selling it to these data brokers so we should be good right government agency there's a law my taxpayer money pays for them we're good right no the postal service has found a sneaky way around this law it's just it's like so sleazy it's just i don't know if i can talk about it without like being angry here in the united states it's estimated that like a fifth of the population moves houses every year it's an estimate but it's a lot of people millions and millions tens of millions of people move change addresses when they do that they want their mail to not go to the old address where they used to live they want it to be forwarded to their new address you can go onto the postal service website and you can create a request that says when mail comes to my old house forward it to my new house it's really nice it's a great service and i'm very excited in fact i had to go through this recently because we're moving so i forwarded all my mail filled it out was ready to go thank you postal service okay so here's the sleazy part the postal service takes that information that i gave them when i told them hey i'm moving to this new address and they create a giant database of every single person who has moved in the u.s in the past four years and then they sell it to the freaking data brokers like this they just like full-on license this list to the data brokers and you're like wait isn't that against the law aren't they aren't they like selling my personal information well as one guy who we interviewed for this video stated if you say to them well you're selling lists they say no no no no we're not doing that we're just correcting lists you look at this more catalogs we are just helping these data brokers update their giant list of every address in the entire country we're just helping them update it to notify them of exactly who you are and where you moved to these data brokers license this list for like the tune of 200 000 to get access to this list and it's totally worth it i thought i was going to be sort of escaping the junk mail thing when we moved no because i filled out this forwarding address thing all of the data brokers now know exactly where i'm moving to freaking post office i thought we were friends i thought i funded you with my taxpayer money for the past two years i have been thinking about what it would take to completely rid my life of all of this communication not a single piece of junk mail arrives to my mailbox my inbox is completely free of everything besides what i actually want to see and my phone is a space where i get phone calls that i actually want to answer it's been an exhausting journey and if enough people comment about this and like want to hear about what that is i will gladly make the video i believe that our attention is valuable that what we decide to pay attention we use that word pay because it's like we are giving a finite resource to something what we decide to pay attention to matters and we live in a world that increasingly values that attention and creates products that are optimized to lock it in and to steal that attention without consent that's disturbing to me and so when i look at this it's not really about this it's about the principle of my finite attention being taken up by someone i didn't give permission to it's a broader effort i'm making in my life and one that i feel like is very necessary to choose the things that i pay attention to as opposed to letting those things choose me i hope this video was helpful and enlightening in some way and um i am really interested in hearing your your feedback today's video is sponsored by storyblocks who you've heard me talk about before i'm a giant fan of storyblocks i've been using storybox for many years well before they ever came to me to sponsor a video and that's because they are really the best stock footage company out there that you can pay so little for and get so much from they have a giant library of stock footage of all kind some of which i used for this video every video i make i find myself on storyblocks looking for footage to help beef up the visuals because i can't go everywhere and film everything myself and yet for like a monthly cost of a subscription you have unlimited access to all of this stuff and it's not just stock footage it's sound effects it's after effects templates it's a bunch of tools that as a creator are incredibly useful to have at my desk when i'm trying to make stuff there's a link in my description when you click that link it helps support this channel but it's where you can go to sign up for storyblocks if you're a creator this is a no-brainer to have access to all of this extra visual material to help beef up your videos so click the link in the description thank you storyblocks for supporting this video and supporting this channel i really appreciate that and thank you all for watching i'm gonna keep going on my quest to get rid of junk mail and it's hard and exhausting but it's also something i'm fairly dedicated to as you've seen in this video so have a good day that's great

Channel: Johnny Harris

Views: 439,317

Rating: 4.9145579 out of 5

Keywords: Junk Mail, USPS, Johnny Harris, Vox, Johnny Harris Vox, Vox Borders, Spam Mail, Spam email, Junk mail Mailbox, how to stop junk mail, I hate Junk Mail, Selling data, USPS selling data, Direct Marketing, direct mail marketing, Selling my data, Junk Email, Spam Calls, junk email options outlook 2016, junk email options outlook, junk mail in gmail, junk mail whistle song - cyanide and happiness, mac os, macbook pro

Id: yyWjHVmZWvg

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020