A lot of countries in Africa do not have addressing systems and there is a push to have them adopt these granular forms of addressing for e-commerce and government service delivery. But existing addressing systems are structured to precisely link occupants to specific identity. I am reading more on this and would appreciate any leads.
These systems are designed to point at a specific location. You can improve the privacy by decreasing the granularity (ex 100m vs 1km vs 10km per code) however then you are reducing the utility.
Plus Codes are interesting because the length of the code determines the accuracy. So if you want something delivered to your door you can provide an accurate code but if you just need to find the nearest bank you can choose a lower accuracy. Of course this doesn’t prevent various services from demanding a code of at least a given accuracy.
At the end of the day the job of these systems are to provide your location. So the only ways to improve privacy is
I did not know of Plus Codes but I do know of GhanaPostGPS. I see how this can be worked on to offer a better addressing system without taking too much information away from the individual. Something like a GPS location that is hashed. Then time-sensitive address tokens can be used depending on use case. If you buy a product and should be delivered in three days, you can give a token with one week expiration. That way, the company cannot use your purchase details to link to your address since the token has not real GPS location on it. But there are many loopholes that can be exploited in many ways.
But you can’t expire a physical location. So once that store converts it into a location there is nothing stopping them from storing that, even if the original token expires.
The conversion part is the tricky bit. If a third party decides to use their own system to convert GPS location to deliveries, that is out of your control. But you can perhaps use delivery locations that do not necessarily point to your exact location. It is a hard problem to both have a fixed location address and still keep some privacy.