I like your proposal. I was just thinking about this problem recently too. In an era where people are becoming more privacy conscious online, they can make reasoned decisions about how much of their data they shield from megacorp$ that are eager to vacuum it all up. But if you want to partake in the convenience of online commerce, how do you effectively shield yourself from providing your home address to dozens/hundreds of companies?
I wonder if there would be a market for the service you're describing today. It seems you could achieve it in the current postal system. You sign up and are assigned a unique identifier, which you use as your "Name", then ship to a local address maintained by that service, who then forward it on.
All you're doing in this case is just centralizing the trust from each individual online business to the reshipping service. Is that a reasonable first step?
Is Netflix the kind of company we want doing this though?
I'd imagine it being some kind of non-profit organization that is funded by a combination of donations + fees for the reshipping service.
Put differently, if we want to centralize all this sensitive information (people's residential address), would you want an organization beholden to shareholders and profit margins operating it?
Because they already have a deal with the post office where you can send something to your nearest Netflix distribution center without having to specify where it is. At the moment the only thing you can send there is Netflix DVDs, but fixing that is just a negotiation away.
It seems Netflix solves that by not requiring the USPS to actually deliver those DVDs, they just get them to a hub and Netflix workers fetch them from there (and occasionally simply check them and re-label them for deliver to another customer), but that seems a bit too complex and expensive for regular mail and packages.
I wonder if there would be a market for the service you're describing today. It seems you could achieve it in the current postal system. You sign up and are assigned a unique identifier, which you use as your "Name", then ship to a local address maintained by that service, who then forward it on.
All you're doing in this case is just centralizing the trust from each individual online business to the reshipping service. Is that a reasonable first step?