Postal Service Wins Points for Privacy

They deliver all the junk mail you never wanted. They know where your Aunt Sally lives, what kind of magazines you read and when your federal tax refund has arrived.

Given what they know, the people at the U.S. Postal Service are pretty good about protecting privacy, Americans say.

In fact, the Postal Service finished first in a new survey rating Americans' confidence about whether federal agencies will protect their personal information. The survey by the Ponemon Institute gathered opinions from 6,128 people nationwide about the perceived trustworthiness of 74 federal agencies. Respondents were paid and can have had no direct dealings with many of the federal agencies they were asked about.

"No other government agency has the one-to-one, personalized service with its customers, six days a week, 52 weeks a year," Delores Killette, the Postal Service's consumer advocate, said.

Other agencies that respondents said they trusted most to protect privacy included the Federal Trade Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Consumer Protection, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Census Bureau, the Social Security Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the federal courts.

The least-trusted arms of the government were the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Office of the Attorney General, the National Security Agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Bureau of Prisons.

-- Christopher Lee