Adressgegevens

Adressgegevens, often referred to as address data, are data that identify a location linked to an individual or organization. They are used for communication, shipping, billing, and identity verification. A typical adresgegevens set includes street name and house number, postal code, city, and country; additional fields may include apartment or unit number, district or province, and geographic coordinates.

Types of address data include residential addresses, business addresses, and mailing or delivery addresses. In practice, organizations may store multiple addresses per contact to support different processes (for example, invoices sent to a company address while shipments go to a warehouse).

Standards and validation: address data are often standardized to improve reliability, and formats vary by country. Organizations use address verification and geocoding tools, and refer to postal authority guidelines. Data quality practices include validation at entry, deduplication, and regular updates to correct changes in street names or administrative boundaries.

Privacy and security: address data can be personal data under data protection laws such as the GDPR when they can identify a person. Processing requires a lawful basis, purpose limitation, data minimization, accuracy, and appropriate retention. Sharing address data with third parties is governed by contracts, privacy policies, and technical safeguards.

Management considerations: implement access controls and audit trails; allow individuals to access and correct their addresses; maintain version histories and change logs; set retention schedules; and consider anonymization or pseudonymization for analytics where feasible.