Re:Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis (2019)
by mattforrest on Friday February 07, 2025 @03:28PM
(#42977103)
Yeah but we have that already in the census hierarchy. Plus you have to pay to access Zip+4 geospatial data and it changes sometime as frequently as quarterly
A 5+4 formatted ZIP code maps to just a handful of addresses. In cities with larger populations, the +4 could map to a single building, and in more sparely populated place, it might include houses on a handful of roads.
For smaller datasets, ZIP+4 might as well be a unique household identifier. I just checked a 10 million address database and 60% of entries had a unique ZIP+4, so one other bit of PII would be enough to be a 99.99% unique identifier per person.
With a geo-coded ZIP+4 database, you could locate people with a precision that's proportional to the population density of their region.