FC: Fred Heutte explains recent changes in privacy law, DMV data

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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"California sells birth records of its citizens"
http://www.politechbot.com/p-02877.html

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From: Fred Heutte <phred () sunlightdata com>
To: <declan () well com>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 15:32:46 GMT
Subject: Re: FC: Responses to California sells birth records of its citizens
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I can tell from your correspondents that there is a great deal of
misinformation or just lack of information.

Since I deal with public data (voter files, mostly) for a living,
let me provide some current context on motor vehicle and driver's
license registration files.

We used to routinely buy DMV files in order to add date-of-birth
to fill in the gaps in voter registration data (which in turn is generally
available only for political campaigns, and the penalties for using
it for commercial purposes are substantial).

The US Supreme Court in Reno v. Condon, January 12, 2000, unanimously
upheld the Driver's Privacy Protection Act.  There was a very
complicated legal and political fight over several years leading up
to the decision that I won't go into much, starting with a South
Carolina case.  Basically there were three positions: (1) a state's
rights position, which was upheld by the Fourth Circuit when it
overturned the DPPA as unconstitutional; (2) a right-to-know position,
advanced by some newspapers and other media; and (3) a balancing
approach as adopted in the DPPA, which the Supreme Court affirmed in
reversing the court below.  On the specifics, the Court's decision was on
the side of a strict interpretation of the privacy features of the DPPA.

The outcome is that DMV files, particularly the "personal data" which
depending on the state used to be provided for "research" and "marketing"
purposes, are no longer available for other than very narrowly defined
exceptions such as law enforcement, contractual matters (for example,
repos), and so on.

The conditions and costs of availability of DMV data used to vary
quite a bit by state, but generally now we are finding it to be
unavailable at all in the wake of the Supreme Court decision,
especially following implementation of the "opt-in" requirement on
application forms in June 2000.  Even before opt-in, more than 25%
of drivers in states like Maryland had already opted out, greatly
reducing the value of the data (when available) for purposes like our
voter file updates.

Fred

http://www.ibrinc.com/dppa.html




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