When you buy stuff with a credit card online these days, they always want your address, because they will plug it into their credit card verification system, even if they are not shipping you a physical product.

I’m trying to give my physical address out less and less these days, and would in the long term love something like the addresscrow system I proposed.

However, as an interim, it might be nice to formalize a “fake” credit card billing address, authorized by the credit card company, that you can give when placing orders that will not be shipped to your physical address.

You can already do this, in that credit card verification systems tend to focus only on your street number and zip code, and rarely on your phone number, so you can make up a fake address based on this. If you live at 124 Elm St. 60609, you can usually get credit card verification with “124 Fake St. Chicago, IL 60609” choosing a street name that doesn’t exist so the post office will discard that mail. (Though often post offices try to be “good” and will get mail to you even if the street name is wrong. I guess you could try 124 DoNotDeliver St. to give them the hint.)

If it became official, the post offices could better learn what to do. There are arguments for and against letting the biller realize the address is fake. Good billers would accept this and not add it to mailing lists. Bad billers might refuse to let you enter the address.