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.
It is possible.
A PO box type system. You rent a letter box, like renting a locker in a train station. You pay in cash. Anyone who needs to send you letters, you give him this address instead of your house address.
A cedex type system. The post office assigns you a code. People send letters to this code and the post office knows to forward them on to your house.
A post office window type system. You use the address of the local post office and a password. The post gets delivered to the post office, and you can go and collect it using your password.
This was just a quick brainstorm. I’m sure other and better schemes are possible.
This is very promising – the post office system is quite extensive in some of these countries. Some of the pressing e-commerce demands may not work with this (like night time food delivery, or e-taxi). Perhaps all this goes to show individual efforts at maintaining privacy can only work minimally. This is a structural issue needing collective effort.
I was thinking just about posting letters.
For food delivery or taxis, you don’t need to tell anyone your name or address, just the location they are to go to. So the gps based ideas in this thread, or a conventional number, road, town address works be fine.
The best solution is usually a mixture of several methods, not a one size fits all.