Introduction: "Could I take your new address?"
Saturday, 9:20 a.m. The van is double-parked, your cousin is carrying the sofa, and you're on the phone with your internet provider. The agent is efficient. "Could I take your new address?" You dictate it, letter by letter, out in the street, in front of three neighbours and a delivery driver. Then you give it again to your insurer. Then to the bank. Then to the water company, the vet, the health insurer, the gym, the online grocery site, the classified ads platform, the furniture shop for delivery, and the bakery that asks for your postcode "for the loyalty scheme."
In three weeks, you've broadcast the exact spot where you sleep to several dozen organisations, half of which will resell it, share it, or have it stolen within five years.
A home address is a category of its own. It isn't a password you can change, or a number you can cancel: it's a physical place, where your children, your possessions and your sleep are. An email leak produces spam. A postal address leak produces cold calling, intercepted mail, unwanted deliveries — sometimes a visit. For someone fleeing an abusive partner, an aggressive creditor, a stalker, or simply an inconvenient past, it is the number one piece of data to protect.
A move is the worst possible time to think about it — and the only moment when you can genuinely start afresh. This guide offers a method: deciding who gets your real address, and who gets a different one, entirely legally.
Why your address circulates so widely
The four distribution channels
| Channel | What happens | Your room for manoeuvre |
|---|---|---|
| Mandatory declarations | Tax office, family benefits, social security, prefecture, employer, bank | Low: the real address is legally required |
| Useful contracts | Energy supplier, water, broadband, home insurance | Low: it identifies the property itself |
| Optional commercial | Loyalty schemes, e-commerce, catalogues, warranties, prize draws | High: often optional or replaceable |
| Unintentional | Parcel labels, letterbox, entryphone, directories, social media, old contracts | High, but it takes method |
The classic mistake is fighting the first channel (impossible and pointless: public administration is tightly regulated) while leaving the last two wide open — and those are the real source of trouble.
The address data market
Three mechanisms feed the mailing-list industry:
- "Recently moved" databases: providers reconstruct address changes from declared sources and cross-referencing, then sell advertisers the holy grail of marketing — a household that has just arrived, and is therefore about to buy furniture, a kitchen, insurance, a subscription.
- Data breaches: every hack of a retail site releases full addresses, often bundled with the name, phone number and purchase history. The breach notifications published in recent years by the CNIL offer a regular snapshot of this.
- Cross-referenced public data: directories, publicly accessible electoral rolls, legal notices for associations, professional registers. None of these is secret; put end to end, they pinpoint a person.
Remember the principle: an address is never disclosed all at once. It is reconstructed, piece by piece, through an accumulation of small oversights.
Before you leave: cleaning up the old address
Don't leave your name behind
Your old home is a gateway to the new one. Whoever moves in after you and receives your mail can learn your bank, your health insurer, your subscriptions and — if you've set up mail forwarding — your new town.
To do in the days before you leave:
- Remove your name from the letterbox, the entryphone and the occupants' board. A blank label is better than a crossed-out one: crossed out, it can still be read.
- Photograph the inventory and the meter readings: this avoids billing chases that would later justify someone hunting down your new address.
- Empty the letterbox completely the day before, including flyers that sometimes carry your name.
- Collect any parcels in transit and freeze upcoming orders.
- Destroy — don't just bin — the paperwork you're not keeping. A move generates kilos of archives: statements, prescriptions, cancelled contracts. A cross-cut document shredder does in one evening what the bin in the bike store never will.
Mail forwarding: useful, but talkative
The postal service's mail forwarding option is convenient and, from a privacy standpoint, ambivalent. It means declaring your new address to an operator, and it causes your new address to be rewritten on every envelope that passes through. A forwarded envelope arriving at your home therefore visibly carries both the old and the new address — including when that envelope is later thrown into a communal bin room.
Two sensible approaches:
- Short-term forwarding (a few months), long enough to work through your contracts, then a clean stop.
- No forwarding at all if your situation demands maximum discretion: you then update the fifteen contracts that genuinely matter yourself, and accept losing the rest. Losing marketing mail is a benefit, not a loss.
In both cases, notify essential organisations individually rather than relying on redirection: it stops one day, and on that day the mail heads back to a home that is no longer yours.
Building a legal "front" address
The idea isn't to lie to the authorities — that's illegal and counterproductive. It's to have a second acceptable address for everyone who has no need whatsoever to know where you sleep.
The options, compared
| Solution | Indicative cost | Accepts parcels | Suitable for |
|---|---|---|---|
| PO box (post office) | Modest annual subscription | No, or limited | Marketing mail, associations, correspondence |
| Pickup point / parcel locker | Often included in delivery | Yes | E-commerce, second-hand purchases |
| Commercial business address | Monthly, contract-based | Yes | Freelancers, sole traders |
| A consenting friend's address | Free | Yes | Occasional use, with clear agreement |
| Unnamed letterbox | Free | Yes | Reducing on-site identification |
The golden rule: the delivery address is not the billing address. Almost every retail site lets you separate the two, and almost nobody does. For bulky purchases, a pickup point isn't enough; that's where a folding hand truck saves you from having a piece of furniture delivered to your door when you could have collected it yourself.
What you can't move
Let's be clear about the limits. Your real address is still owed to:
- the tax authorities and social security bodies (family benefits, health insurance, pensions);
- your employer, for obligations tied to your employment contract;
- your bank and your insurer, under know-your-customer and insured-risk obligations;
- services tied to the property itself: energy, water, internet, building management, home insurance.
On these channels, protection doesn't mean hiding the address, but limiting its onward sharing: refusing the partner-sharing tick boxes, demanding removal of the details from shared customer portals, checking the occupant lists displayed in the building.
Physical leaks: the link everyone forgets
Parcels, labels and bins
A parcel label contains your full name, your full address, often your phone number, sometimes the nature of the product. It ends up in an accessible container. Three habits:
- Peel off or black out the label before binning the box. An opaque-ink permanent marker is enough, provided you also strike through the reverse side: ink bleeds through less than you'd think.
- Choose pickup points rather than home delivery for sensitive purchases (health, sexuality, valuable equipment).
- Decline descriptive markings on packaging when the retailer offers neutral shipping.
The letterbox itself
A communal letterbox lock can be forced in seconds with a screwdriver. Stolen mail enables fraudulent account openings, duplicate document requests and identity theft. A secure letterbox with a reinforced lock, where the building rules allow it, costs less than a single case of identity theft. Failing that, collect your mail every day and opt for paperless billing.
Neighbours and the building manager
The new home comes with a curious ecosystem: a displayed occupants' list, a residents' messaging group, the caretaker's register, the entryphone panel. You can ask to appear only by initial on the entryphone and not to feature on publicly displayed lists — a name is personal data, and displaying it must remain proportionate to the purpose. If refused, a written exchange with the building manager, then a complaint to the CNIL, remains the normal route.
Cleaning up your address online
Working through your accounts, in the right order
Don't enter your new address everywhere out of reflex. Sort your accounts into three piles:
- To update with the real address: government bodies, bank, insurers, healthcare, employer, school.
- To update with the front address: e-commerce, loyalty schemes, press, associations, classified ads platforms.
- To delete: dormant accounts. A move is the best possible excuse to exercise your right to erasure (Article 17 of the GDPR) with services you no longer use. A simple message will do: "I request the deletion of my account and my personal data, including my postal address, under Article 17 of the GDPR."
Keeping track of this in your head is wishful thinking; a paper password notebook, stored out of sight, remains the most robust way to list accounts, addresses used and dates of action — provided you never leave it lying on the desk.
Cutting off postal and phone marketing
- Telephone preference registration for cold calling: free to sign up, requires renewal, with real but imperfect results.
- A "no junk mail" sticker on the letterbox for unaddressed printed matter: it originates with ADEME, and it works well.
- Objecting with each advertiser for addressed mail: the right to object to direct marketing (Article 21 of the GDPR) is exercised directly, in writing, and the company must stop using your address for prospecting.
- Systematically declining the universal directory with your phone operator: going ex-directory prevents your name, number and address from being published and picked up by reverse directories.
Your own posts
The biggest broadcaster of your new address is often you. The photo of the empty living room with the view out of the window, the "finally moved in, amazing neighbourhood" post, the furniture-for-sale listing with a shot showing the street number, the geolocation left switched on in your images. A single photo of a building façade is enough to locate a home in minutes.
Three simple rules: wait several weeks before mentioning the move online, never photograph the exterior or the exact view, and turn off location recording in your phone's camera settings.
Sharing your new address without broadcasting it
You do have to pass it on to a few people. The channel matters as much as the content.
- Avoid group chats: an address written in a thread of twenty people is a public address. It will be copied, backed up, exported.
- Split the information: send the street via one channel, the door code and floor via another. An isolated screenshot then becomes useless.
- Prefer speaking for your inner circle, and minimal writing for everyone else.
- Use an account-free channel when you need to give practical information to someone you'd rather not feed your identity to: an anonymous text sent from the web lets you confirm a delivery slot, reply to a property listing or brief a tradesperson without permanently linking your personal number to your name and your front door.
Special case: when hiding is a safety matter
For people at risk, French law provides specific mechanisms, and they must be requested explicitly:
- registering an address with a third party or an approved body (local social action centre, charity) for administrative procedures;
- using your lawyer's address for service in legal proceedings, so that your real address doesn't appear in documents shared with the opposing party;
- a non-disclosure request with the school, to prevent contact details being passed to the other parent where there is a risk;
- filing a police report documenting attempts to locate you, which will underpin any subsequent protective measure.
In these situations, the address must never circulate "just once, to keep things simple." It's always that one time that counts.
Action plan: the three waves
Wave 1 — The two weeks before the move
- List the organisations to notify, sorted into three piles (real / front / delete).
- Set up the front address solution you've chosen.
- Destroy unnecessary archives, remove your name from the old letterbox.
- Decide whether to activate mail forwarding, and for how long.
Wave 2 — The first month
- Update essential contracts one by one, systematically refusing commercial data sharing.
- Separate billing address from delivery address on retail sites.
- Register with the telephone preference service, put up a "no junk mail" sticker, ask your operator to go ex-directory.
- Check how your name appears on the entryphone and on building lists.
Wave 3 — Three to six months in
- Stop the mail forwarding and check that no important mail depends on it.
- Send erasure requests to dormant services.
- Search your own name and old address in a search engine to spot directories that need correcting.
- Test for leaks: order something innocuous and look at what the label reveals.
Conclusion: an address is not an identity
People often think protecting your privacy means disappearing. That's neither possible nor desirable: you want to receive your prescriptions, your reimbursements, your books and your friends. The realistic goal is more modest and far more effective: making sure that the number of organisations that know the exact spot where you sleep stays in the low double digits, and that this number is chosen, not imposed.
A move is the only moment when this reset is easy. Every form you fill in that month is worth ten erasure requests next year. Take an hour, before the boxes, to decide once and for all who deserves to know where you live.
An address given reluctantly is still an address given. The right reflex isn't to negotiate: it's to have another address ready.
