Let Google Decide

When “personhood” is decided by the Big Five

My partner and I recently moved states in order to benefit from lower rent and a more affordable living environment. We found a place on Craigslist for the winter that was not only scam-free, but extremely cute. We visited it in person, met the landlord, and agreed to tenancy until April after the threat of frost. The process, despite its rushed quality, was rather straightforward.

However, we started running into problems when we began updating our address. Google, it seemed, never heard of our road let alone the fact that there were houses on it.

I first noticed this issue when I went to update my address with my online credit union. I was told, in no uncertain terms that the street didn’t exist after I overrode the Google Maps autocomplete. When I switched to our PO Box number, an error message popped up and said that “PO Boxes were not appropriate addresses.”

And so our saga began.

The town, thankfully, knew of the road and gave us no problems when it came to hyper-local needs like car registration at the downtown office. Signing up for a new phone service left us both screaming at the computer, then eventually settling with putting our address as the post office (because, again, PO boxes aren’t “appropriate addresses”). We just hoped that the town being small enough would make it so they would know where to put mail should something ever come from the phone company or any other service that used Google to verify addresses.

Getting a license was also difficult, since mail was rarely delivered to our physical address. Instead, both of us needed to sign an affadavit…to prove that the other person lived with us or at least wasn’t lying about living in the state.

Which, when you think about it, is weird, right?

Go in with enough random people to say you lived at a place and that was more legitimate than a letter with your address on top from a propane company that served half the state.

The letter, you see, doesn’t count because it wasn’t a bill with the account number on it, even though the mysterious street address was. But of course new tenants wouldn’t have a bill with the account number on it yet since they had only just moved in! Proof of car insurance wasn’t enough either because it only had our mailing address, which is a PO Box…and well, we know what Serious Institutions think of PO Boxes.

And while we have figured at least some of this out, we also had difficulty discerning where to begin. Since, to get the PO Box at all, USPS had to know where we lived and that we had proof of living in the town we wanted the PO Box at…which caused a headache with Google Maps autocomplete again. Because of Google, our address wasn’t even present for the USPS, who should have more say than Google about what is and isn’t an address! It took a sympathetic postmaster to help us out in person, since everyone in that office had delivered local mail to our address previously, so knew we weren’t making things up.

This entire debacle is worth mentioning in as full of detail as possible for two reasons: (1) It shows the extent to which Google can dictate our lives and how we get to live it. (2) Proof of address is needed for so many things, down to the basic necessities to be legal within this country.

If I don’t have an address, I cannot have a bank account. I cannot get a driver’s license, register my car, vote in my town. I cannot even get a library card.

For an entire week, I was a non-person to this country’s bureaucracy, which in some respects should feel freeing, but in the end was a massive pain in the ass. It was frightening to consider that something as simple as an address not showing up on the world’s most popular maps app meant that, without the intervention of locals who understood what it meant to live in a largely unmarked rural area, this non-personhood would’ve potentially been permanent.

On a larger scale, it made me concerned for the use of AI in these kinds of situations. What if I wasn’t able to intercept a human postmaster who could then look at my documents and say that I was able to have a PO Box to receive mail from outside of town? Or talk to a DMV associate who could see that my partner was right beside me and could vouch for my legitimacy as a state resident?

Technology, of course, is falliable. It cannot account for all cases, all possibilities. And forbid the thought of politics entering into it. These tools can easily be manipulated further to label anyone outside of the white, heteronormative, cisgender conglomerate as a non-person in the eyes of the larger system. All they need is a huge company like Google to “not recognize” a few key factors like whole neighborhoods in redlined areas or a gender marker (as compared to a birth certificate or something).

If nothing else, I learned that nothing beats talking to a real, live human being, especially those that are just down the street.