Previous message: "California sells birth records of its citizens" http://www.politechbot.com/p-02877.html --- From: Fred Heutte <phredat_private> To: <declanat_private> Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 15:32:46 GMT Subject: Re: FC: Responses to California sells birth records of its citizens Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-UIDL: fe32baa2a4d93689042e7652c3c01721 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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