Florida DMV sells personal info to private companies, marketing firms | Hacker News Reader

Florida DMV sells personal info to private companies, marketing firms

abcactionnews.com

466 pointsgreen-eclipse142 comments

This is pretty bad. The usual argument of "if you don't like it don't use Facebook/Google/(insert company here)" doesn't apply here. You have to interact with the government to get a DL, there are no competitors. Therefor government services should treat personal information with the utmost respect and discretion, not sell it off to the highest bidder.

In Florida, its not personal though and its not just DMVs. Basically if the government has your information, anyone can submit a FOIA request to get it. This is particularly bad with licensed professionals (Real Estate agents, hair saloon cutters, etc.) that have to have a business license to operate.

You can get the contact information (email, home address, phone number) for all of these individuals b/c its required by law for you to provide that and it be publicly listed.

> In Florida, its not personal though and its not just DMVs. Basically if the government has your information, anyone can submit a FOIA request to get it. This is particularly bad with licensed professionals (Real Estate agents, hair saloon cutters, etc.) that have to have a business license to operate.

But it sounds like this case is different - the companies in question didn't submit FOIA requests, the DMV sold them for profit.

Speaking of FOIA, from further in the article:

> The I-Team wanted to know how much of that money came from marketing firms, but the agency in charge of driver information estimated it would take 154 hours of research and cost nearly $3,000 for the state to give taxpayers an answer.

>>> But it sounds like this case is different - the companies in question didn't submit FOIA requests, the DMV sold them for profit.

The way I interpreted it (and from prior experience with FOIA requests), a government agency can charge you a fee for processing a FOIA request. So the $77MM that the FL DMV made from "sales" of personal information, I interpret as FOIA fees collected for processing FOIA requests.

I could be wrong, that just how I interpreted the article.

I thought that could be true as well, but this line from the article makes me think otherwise:

> One of the data brokers accessing Florida DMV information is Arkansas-based marketing firm Acxiom, which has an agreement with the state to buy driver and ID cardholder data for a penny a record.

Maybe that's just some sort of agreement to automate the FOIA process, but it does imply at least a qualitative difference from the kinds of access you and I get vs. the kind of access that Acxiom gets.

> hair saloon cutters

You need a government-issued licence to cut hair in Florida?!

Pretty much all states require a hairdresser's license.

How does the government determine whether something creative like hair dressing is at a good enough standard?

It's ostensibly about making sure you don't spread disease.

Edit: changed mostly to ostensibly, because of comments below.

It's not. In many states it's a 6-month program. A "don't spread disease" course could be done in 8 hours.

It's about making it harder for people to compete with the existing hair dressers. It's about forcing students into schools. It's about extracting rent from the economy.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cosmetology-rules-show-ab_b_5...

https://reason.com/2016/08/03/do-you-have-a-license-to-braid...

Funny how the chair of the county GOP where I currently live belongs to a party, the GOP, that screams about too many regulations and government shouldn't be picking winners and losers yet he and his wife own and operate a salon school, which in our state is required to cut hair and consists of hundreds of hours to "graduate". The hypocrisy is sickening...

IDK, If he's voicing his support for licensing, or not doing anything about licenses, then yeah it's hypocrisy. But there are a _lot_ of regulations to take down, and this simply might not be high on his priority list. Should his wife be doing black-market hair styling?

Just because someone is compelled into an arrangement they speak against doesn't mean it's hypocrisy.

His wife isn't cutting hair, she's selling required snake oil "education" and debt to others. They say one thing, regulations are bad, but profit off of them. They don't need to be in the business... But it's profitable. They haven't and don't fight the regulation that profits them. They are modern day Pharisees.

And typically an order or two magnitude more hours of required training than to become a licensed police officer...

Consider the harsh chemicals involved in hair coloring and other such treatments. Not only do you have the risk of spreading disease to consider, but you must also be mindful of _serious_ chemical burns. It's anything but trivial.

In most places you need a business license to operate a business of any kind.

Then there's more industry-specific licenses based on what you're doing.

Can you not hire some legal services business to hold the title of your business in some kind of trust? Kind of like what you can do for domain names to obfuscate the true owner

I'm going to write this, and it's going to fall on deaf ears. Not my bros here, but the public, in general.

Elections have consequences and the public does not hold elected officials accountable by the low voter turnout reported. I mean, what - 20% of eligible people vote in local elections, and 50% for presidentials?

>The I-Team wanted to know how much of that money came from marketing firms, but the agency in charge of driver information estimated it would take 154 hours of research and cost nearly $3,000 for the state to give taxpayers an answer.

I'm no rocket scientist but $3,000 (USD) is less than $77M (USD), yeah?

>That’s because Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles said companies buying data on Floridians are not allowed to use that information for marketing.

What did they expect it to be used for? Genealogy reports? /s

> What did they expect it to be used for? Genealogy reports? /s

Serious answer, but I'd guess background checks and such?

> background checks

Without explicit consent from the person being checked? That still seems to be a privacy violation to me.

Well, with Republican state governments cutting all traditional income means (read: taxes) how else are they to afford to run?

This is 77m dollars. Yeah its horrible that your data is being sold. But there's no privacy amendment in the USA. And state budgets are suffering.

Seems like raising taxes and voting better people would go quite a ways to stopping these practices from becoming normalized.

(Edit: for those of you who've -1'ed me, it represents the same game theory that plays out in the electorate for those states. Most states are run by Republicans - fact. Any politicians, primarily Democrats, whom suggests higher taxation are blackballed. Nobody wants higher taxes. Yet, the states can't print money, but still need it. This is how we get into these situations. Game theory 101.

And the -1's, show that. Because, how dare I suggest raising taxes and making these crooked uses of information=>money exfiltration illegal.)

USA does have a privacy amendment, the 4th amendment. Concisely summarized here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_and_seizure#United_Stat...

This comment makes no sense because the Fourth doesn't apply to data/information that you've surrendered to the DMV and that the DMV owns.

Precisely from the same Wiki article that you linked: "...courts have found that a person does not possess a reasonable expectation of privacy in information transferred to a third party...".

So, the right "...to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." doesn't apply, here, whatsoever. The reason that the DMV can sell the data is a direct effect of the fact that they own the data that you've surrendered for the privilege of driving.

In order for your reference to have any standing, jurisprudence must first be reversed and that seems a dauntingly monumental and nigh-impossible task.

It doesn't mean or infer that I think it's a "good" thing (hint: I do not) but to simply dismiss it as being protected by the fourth negates the very premise that has already been established that it isn't (as in this case, with the DMV).

The comment you failed to make sense of makes a specific correction to a specific false statement. The U.S. does in fact have constitutional protection of privacy.

You seem to want to discuss the applicability of that protection to this specific situation. I'm not especially interested in doing that. But I will supply the part of the quote you elided: "transferred to a third party, such as writing on the outside of an envelope sent through the mail or left for pick-up in an area where others might view it"

If you want to argue that giving info to the DMV is analagous to writing on the outside of an envelope, feel free. I was only interested in correcting the common misconception that the constitution doesn't say anything about privacy.

Why would that be without explicit consent?

I worked for a company that had Florida (and other state) DMV data and that's exactly what we did.

Definitely the two most disturbing quotes from the article. They're admitting that citizens' data has been sold to so many companies that it's going to take 154 hours of research just to figure out which companies it was sold to.

>>That’s because Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles said companies buying data on Floridians are not allowed to use that information for marketing.

>What did they expect it to be used for? Genealogy reports? /s

When I worked in government, the forms for FOIA requests always had a disclaimer they couldn't be used for marketing, but the laws were never enforced at all and thus widely abused. The only way to really fix this is to enforce laws, and given that currently those in power to enforce laws can selectively choose which laws to enforce, justice will never be the result.

The only fixes I can think of that aren't band-aids only covering the symptoms are drastic enough changes that I doubt those currently comfortable have the stomach for them.

Claiming it's not used for marketing is blatant newspeak. I'll try and explain what they mean. This sort of data is frequently used by trading firms to try and get a more accurate picture of how auto-companies are doing, or the local economies. Insurance firms also use this data. Experian and Equifax almost definitely use it too.

The data is terrifyingly granular, most DMVs do this. The company which I currently work for, has a database of all the currently registered cars, with their owners addresses and ages in America.

While not used in marketing that you see, it's used in aggregate market analytics.

Thanks, that makes more sense of what kind of data this is for. Still annoying that the DMV doesn't notify you about it up front, or have an opt-out from the start.

Been happening for decades. When I got my driver's license (in the 1980's) in Iowa, they misspelled my name - Soseph instead of Joseph. I asked for a corrected license. They typed up another one but didn't go back and correct the record.

So, I got solicitations in the mail for months for Soseph Altmaier. And that was before computers were used much.

Its the same with voter registrations. Anybody can request it for free. And Indiana charges 5000$ for every voter in the state.

Its also the same for property deeds. Public record. Its also the same for courts.

I find this practice to be disgusting, but there is precedent for open access to govt record.

The courts one is different. The reason for everything being public is to have transparency into the person getting a swift and fair trial.

I was just mentioning all the data sources the govt emits that Ive used in OSINT.

As usual, maybe they're not making a distinction but there's a distinction to be made: single record query vs bulk export vs aggregate stats. They're three different things.

I don't get why IRL mail spam is still allowed. It's a fucking nuisance. 95% of the mail I get is junk mail. Another 4% is recurring bill notices or something similarly low-value (yeah, I could probably make some of those go away by logging into whatever-it-is and checking a box somewhere, but it's overwhelmed by the junk mail anyway). Maybe 1% is something I actually care about. And I get a lot of mail.

I'd pay a fee for mail service if I must. Worth it. Just end unsolicited bulk mail, and make solicited bulk mailers ask me to opt in again every year or so, and stop on a negative response, or none at all. It's not free speech, it's my friggin' mailbox, and others shouldn't be able to damn near DOS it just because they want me to know about their special offer or lie to me about politics. I get that the postal service needs that money to stay afloat, hence my being cool with a fee of some sort replacing the bulk mailing.

For that matter, I'm not sure how a good portion of junk mail isn't fraud or false advertising or something along those lines. I get a lot of really deceptive commercial mail, pretending to be things that it isn't, like official notices, bills, credit cards (god those fake card advertisements are stupid), and so on.

> I don't get why IRL mail spam is still allowed.

Because bulk mail makes up the majority of the USPS operating budget.

So maybe let's shift some budget from EPA to USPS, given that killing off mail spam means that much less environmental damage to deal with.

Yeah, I should write someone in my country and make the same argument here. It's a fucking nuisance in Poland as well.

One day somebody - maybe the underpaid delivery labor, maybe some angry neighbor - dumped some of the spam that was left on the mailboxes all over the floor of our block of flats. Most of the leaflets were of a local pizza chain, so I got on my bike, drove over to them and rose a stink about it with their manager. Not sure if it did anything, but boy it felt good. It's probably wasn't even their fault - except it was, for printing and distributing this garbage in the first place. I think people need to start retaliating against the companies that advertise this way.

Back of the envelope (haha) we're talking somewhere in the range of $10-20/person/month, gross. Say half that after costs incurred by actually transporting and delivering that bulk mail (so, 50% profit, which seems high but is fine for the sake of argument).

I dunno about you, but I wouldn't just vote for a $5-10/month tax to eliminate junk mail entirely, I'd go door-to-door campaigning for it. I'd make signs. I'd call all my friends. What a bargain.

You've neglected methods and cost of enforcement. Getting rid of the bulk rate for spam would help tremendously, but even at higher rates it's still going to be profitable for a lot of companies. Real estate, credit card, and automobile companies are the first that come to mind for me.

Politically, I expect the American Postal Workers' Union will put up a tremendous fight.

This is one of those things that's so stupid and useless we'd be better off paying everyone concerned—the marketers, the artists, the copywriters, the postal workers, everyone—to do nothing, since the result of their work is actually harmful. These sorts of problems are just the worst. Probably right about the postal workers' union fighting it.

I'm wondering, in the absence of junk mail, if the post office could reduce prices on package delivery. I'm not sure where the main costs are, but if they're in the last mile... well now the post office would have trucks with a lot more space on them driving through the same routes anyway.

There's a large trash can right next to my neighborhood's mailboxes that everyone dumps the junk into with barely a glance - really illustrates how wasteful it is to be delivering it in the first place. It's a disgustingly huge trash can that has to be emptied daily.

Ha. I petitioned to our HOA to put a trash can next to every mailbox and they refused.

Write "not deliverable" and drop it back into the "outbound mail" slot? Or get a stamp with the same for even-less-work version.

Hah, tried that. The local post office will just deliver it to your mailbox again, and again, and again. My record is 3 times for a real piece of mail addressed to someone who used to live where I live. After that I just recycled it.

You have to cross out or write over the To address on the envelope. If you add some scribbles to a corner of the envelope, yeah, they won't notice and just re-deliver.

Of course I did that: I crossed out the address, and wrote in big black letters "return to sender, addressee not known at this address". That didn't help. I guess I should have used a sharpie to make the To: address illegible to prevent re-delivery!

You do pay a fee for mail service. While USPS is not directly funded by taxes, it is funded by the Federal Government. Our taxes are responsible for financing the government's initiatives.

The problem is that the cost to bulk mail (at least 200 pieces) is merely $0.19 per piece. If you want to DOS an entire zip code regardless, EDDM is actually cheaper (per piece) at $0.187. USPS is getting that money. You would need to pay a fee higher than $0.19 per piece of junk mail that you receive for USPS to just break even.

That $0.19's not pure profit. There are fixed costs to providing service to all these addresses, sure, but even so, bulk mail has to add expenses on top of that, for transportation, storage, and delivery. The fee to end junk mail would only need to cover the net income from that, not the gross.

The USPS receives no federal funding.

It does get various breaks a private company wouldn't that you can argue amount to subsidies, such as not having to pay taxes. And it does have what amounts to a government-enforced monopoly on certain types of shipping.

But there is no funding allocated from the federal government to the USPS.

> It's a fucking nuisance

It's also a monumental waste of resources: process trees for paper, process inks, print the spam, ship spam to distribution center, ship spam to local dispatch, drive spam to mailbox, recipient puts spam directly into trash, garbage collector drives to collect spam, dump spam into a hole in the ground, bury the spam.

While I'm sure it's inaccurate, that's about the gist of it, isn't it? You can substitute trash for recycling to get an equally pointless loop of wasting resources.

> While I'm sure it's inaccurate, that's about the gist of it, isn't it?

You forgot the waste of electricity and people-hours that is designing the spam. Otherwise, that's about it for the primary waste. There undoubtedly are second-order effects as well.

What's worst, this waste is practically unbounded. The answer to your competitor acquiring customers through sending out spam is to send out even more spam.

You can pay a fee to avoid mail spam. Just rent a Post Office box and they’ll filter all that stuff out for you. Downside is that they won’t bring it to your house.

If you want a post office that works for you and taxes you appropriately, amen. Some politicians believe that organizations like the post office should be privatized and taxes minimized, thus USPS is forced to find private revenue sources. The result is junk.

The egregious wastefulness of USPS junk mail is annoying and obvious, but at least it is visible to the average consumer. The wastefulness of online advertising is more insidious, because the average consumer does not see that their router is dutifully transmitting megabytes of tracking code, to be interpreted by their computer, to be filtered by ad block or (obnoxiously) shown to them. Just browsing your local newspaper site is similar in terms of wastefulness to recieving a handful of junk mailers.

I don't get why IRL mail spam is still allowed

Simple: it's a source of income for the USPS.

Precisely. Kentucky did the same. Though, I mostly found it beneficial as I received a lot of coupons from home stores..

I got fliers for colleges. First drivers license - college age. Some marketer put that together.

This really pisses me off because you don't even have an option to not do business with the DMV. Even if you don't drive (highly unlikely in FL), you still need a non-driving ID card so there's no way to avoid getting swept up into this bullshit.

I see they have included an opt out link. That's nice. I wonder if they honor it. Even if they do, 99.999% of the population will never even know to do this because they've probably never heard of this company (I didn't until today).

> Even if they do, 99.999% of the population will never even know to do this because they've probably never heard of this company (I didn't until today).

Not only that, now you know about it and you opt out, but that doesn't get your data back from every place they sold it to the week before you found out about it.

> you still need a non-driving ID card

Just to clarify, the state ID is not required by law, but you will be hard pressed to get by socially without it.

In the posted video, they said it was required for Medicaid.

Among other things. You'd have to live a mostly-off-grid lifestyle without it, but it's possible and completely legal. I.e., you are never legally required to produce any type of state ID card in Florida.

Not true.

In most states (FL included) you will be arrested for failing to identify if there is probable cause for requesting such identification, i.e. a traffic violation or suspicion of criminal activity.

Still true. All that means is verbally telling them the correct name and birthdate. No ID required. (Unless, of course, you were driving, obviously.)

And one wonders of why identify theft happens. OPM, Health Insurance, IRS, Credit Card companies, different websites you purchase from, have lost our information. Then they give you 1 year of free monitoring like that f.... matters. But to see a government owned agency to sale your personal information is beyond sick.

I hope that one day we get to really be the sole owner of our own PII. Maybe it’s a dream, maybe I am naive, but I sure do hope that day comes.

What we really need is steep fines for losing PII.

With the current government that won’t happen but here’s to hope that in 2020 we get a sane government

Welcome to the United States, where your own government is making money on from your sensitive information...

As a European, this bothers me on so many levels. Government should not for one, sell your personal data and furthermore should make sure if it provides access to it, that it isn't used for anything marketing like.

Many European countries are the same, e.g. governments made sure GDPR doesn't apply to them. For example in Germany government sells data.

What data are you referring to? Is it comparable to this personal data?

In Germany, you are required to be registered where you live. The authority collecting this data (Einwohnermeldeamt) is allowed to reveal parts of this data (addresses) to requesting parties for a fee and under some restricting circumstances (you can opt out, see https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bmg/__44.html).

In the UK we have the open electoral roll, which you can opt out of.

Worse still, companies such as Experian and Equifax have open access to the full register.

There's multiple levels of data transfer at play:

1. Melderegisterauskunft: everyone can ask at the local city government for the current address of a specific person. This isn't free though, it costs (I believe) something about 10-20€ per request.

2. Political parties can get information on electorate: https://www.service-bw.de/leistung/-/sbw/Melderegisterauskun...

3. The GEZ (funding administrators for public television) automatically get all data of persons whenever they move

4. Military gets personal data automatically (we don't have compulsory service anymore, though)

This is slightly off-topic, but i found it rather funny the dutch tax office is not GDPR-compliant. https://tweakers.net/nieuws/151770/belastingdienst-voldoet-n... (article in Dutch)

EU also has a Government DPR, very much like General DPR.

The federal government in the US has pretty strict regulations with regards to PII (personally identifiable information). But apparently Florida doesn’t.

This is generally true about most subjects, not just PII.

Indeed. That's why the federal government agencies hand over the PII to lowest-bidding contractors and subcontractors who then proceed to abuse and leak it.

The USPS sells address updates in bulk for marketing purposes, and they are federally regulated.

Direct Marketers must have your name and prior address in order to receive your updated address. So they are providing updated PII to those who already had your prior PII. You can opt out.

The USPS makes only a few million from selling this data but saves over a billion dollars by avoiding the cost of forwarding mail sent to prior addresses.

The USPS is allowed to do this under an exception for it in the Privacy Act.

Thank you for clarifying. Is it possible the data brokers themselves are buying the update and then selling it onward then? During my last move I received a boat load of direct marketing mail after my COA but before I updated any other accounts / license (took a vacation before arriving at the new home). Many companies I'd never heard of, included some health insurance scams.

If you purchased a new home that public record of sale tends to be the source of a bunch of spam - often claiming to be important mortgage documents.

If you were renting it's possible your landlord or management company provides information on new residents for 'cost saving offers'.

DHSMV (what we call it down here) wrote me a couple of months back to let me know they were hacked. Although they didn't offer ID protection (FWTW) they did call a few times to remind me that they lost something beyond what they're peddling.

And speaking of peddling, they're peddling to people banned by other states from accessing the same sort of material, per http://www.fox13news.com/news/fox-13-investigates/senator-ca... (2016)

I loved Florida when I moved here in the late 70s but Something Happened and the grifters latched on to the power handles. We went from pervasive but obvious corruption through the mid-late 60s, true honest to god sunshine - passing laws other states modeled themselves after, then wham that Something Happened. Don't blame me, I voted for Pajic.

I think this is disgusting, but as someone who grew up in Florida, I do have to wonder what additional information they are actually getting from the DMV; the driver's license had my name, birthday, and address on it, and most of that was fairly easy to find, even before the succubus of Facebook or Google.

I guess being the sort of anti-corporate person that I am, I do definitely have issue with the US government doing anything to assist for-profit corporations, but I don't know how much damage was done by this specifically.

How easy would it be for a company to source contact and location information about everybody in a State?

Easy to find? Sure. That’s a bit different than the local governments selling my information that I’m legally required to give them though. This is shady bullshit.

Fair enough.

I really don't exactly know where we should draw the line of "governments selling stuff for supplemental funding". I'm definitely against them aggregating and selling my data, and my immediate visceral reaction is "the government shouldn't sell anything", but I don't think realistically any harm comes from a teacher having a bake sale to pay for additional school supplies. A teacher at a public school is technically a state government employee, just like DMV workers.

That said, a line does need to be drawn; I guess it's up for the philosophers to figure out where that line needs to be.

In India, you can get the complete nation's vehicle data along with personal information of the owners.

They say, data is the new oil, so exploit it!

https://inc42.com/buzz/indian-govt-is-selling-vehicle-owner-...

Off topic, but a method to determine who sold your contact information.

Whenever I sign up for a service I'll add letters to the end of my first name. I've done this for over 15 years and all of my adult life.

Because of this, I've been able to determine the government is where most of my personal information is sold and used for market material against me.

Disney is also another large culprit of spam. Although, they've kept my information internal to the companies owned or affiliated by them.

Private industry scrapes public records without the government's cooperation though.

If you file for bankruptcy, you will very quickly be inundated by offers for auto loans and high-interest credit cards. The data isn't sold, it's just public record.

The Massachusetts RMV does the same thing and I was unable to find a way to opt out. You can’t drive a car without giving up your personal data to be sold to anyone who pays the RMV. So much junk mail.

That's what bothers me most, it's sold for such a junk purpose. Your privacy is bartered off for cents so that a company can spam you with products you'll never buy. If we put half as much effort into bettering the world as we do building the advertising machine we would be a utopia.

Perhaps the takeaway is we do not incentivize bettering the world enough.

And/or start disincentivizing advertising more. If there were more hoops to jump through, maybe more people would find something better to do with their time than advertising.

How does this work legally? I don't remember signing T&C when I got my licensed renewed last. I'm sure there are some legal forms I filled out but given that it's a requirement to have a state issued license to drive a motor vehicle how could this be remotely legal without an opt-out option? It seems like a monopoly if the state gets to profit from selling data without consent that a citizen is forced to use. I don't live in FL, but... Curious how this plays out now.

This seems like a hidden form of taxation. Instead of paying money, citizens pay "taxes" with their private data.

Given the prevalence of the “all taxes are bad” narrative that’s effectively cut taxes over the past couple of decades I’m not surprised. The money has to come from somewhere, so if the honest way of getting money is blocked the dishonest ones have to be used.

That pre-supposes that the problem is money - state and local revenues have been growing at 6%+ CAGR since the 1970’s, well in excess of inflation. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/state-general-rev...

But what does that look like on a per-capita basis?

Well population growth over that period was ~1% and inflation was ~3.7% so still ~1.3% real increase in spending a year...

What we need for enforcement are honeypot records seeded through the DMVs: fake people registered at PO Boxes that would allow another agency to prosecute companies spamming them w mail.

Happens in Wisconsin too, but when you get your drivers license you have the option to opt out at least.

https://www.channel3000.com/news/dot-sells-drivers-personal-...

NC does the same thing. And if you buy a house, expect to receive endless junk mail disguised as mortgage documentation.

FWIW, I've had a similar experience. So I was curious who sold my information and did some digging (was it my realtor, insurance agent, or title agent?). I asked each of them, they all denied it, but told me:

When you buy a house, all your info is public information on your county's website (most up to date counties). Unfortunately, I don't think you can stop them from publishing that information and having bots scrape that data to send you junk mail.

Large, secured loans are recorded in public ledgers by law. I believe the motivation was to prevent people from going around and securing multiple loans with the same asset, before credit-scoring agencies existed.

> Large, secured loans are recorded in public ledgers by law.

That's not true of “large, secured loans” in general.

OTOH, it is true of certain real property interests, including those of both owners and secured lenders; this is about the size of a secured loan, it's about clarity of title to real estate.

What large, secured loans are not a matter of public record under UCC[1]?

My understanding is that if it can be repossessed, the lender must have recorded the debt.

It applies to assets other than real estate, too.

Most counties redact your name from their public website. But they don’t actually need that anyway. Your credit report has the address of the house and how much you owe on the mortgage.

And the credit agencies will sell your info to anyone.

There are also call center programs that call specifically to fill in those details. You answer, they ask who they are speaking to, then click, they're gone.

Source?

> Most counties redact your name from their public website.

In what state? Dallas County (TX) and Broward County (FL) don't. Nor does New Jersey (we have a unified system for all 22 counties). In Dallas County I can even see the names of everyone who owned a property for the previous five years as well.

Edit: s/Not/Nor/

In California I’ve never found a county that lists the property owner online. The only way to get the owner is to go to the county recorders office and look it up there.

Califironia has a law against state and local government displaying name and address of elected officials (and maybe some others?). California counties have decided it's easier to just not show any names on online property taz records than figure out who is an elected official.

There is some value in a public record of whom owns what land. Minimally it would create stronger property rights where things can’t be sold twice over like they are in other countries. One might also want to know if the owners are foreign entities.

Of course wealthier owner get around this: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreig...

Seriously. I can't believe the mail doesn't violate some kind of FTC regulation about impersonating your mortgage lender. So many of the mailpieces were designed in such a way that I almost believed it was coming from the lender and not some third party company that wants me to buy a warranty.

Yup, we were warned about this beforehand, and saw it too.

I was not warned, and was a little put off when we started receiving endless "notices" that listed the exact loan balance at closing.

This has happened in every state I've ever lived. I had always assumed it was the Post Office that was responsible.

They are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Change_Of_Address

Real estate transactions are public records. Companies monitor for sales and market to the new buyers. The same happens when you start a company. The company registration is a public record.

I’m not sure about Florida, but many states also make it illegal to not put your actual, honest, this-is-where-I-sleep-every-night residence address on your DL/ID card, too, making this doubly bad, as they then publicize data that is directly relevant to the physical safety of yourself and your family.

Avoiding it is illegal.

And even if they don't voter registration almost always requires a real physical address, and is often a public record. So victims of domestic violence, stalking etc are incentivized not to register to vote.

There is a program in some states that allows you a confidential state-run mail forwarding address for this purpose. You can then use it at the DMV and your state-run forwarding address gets leaked via public records.

Unfortunately, it requires that one ask permission to use the program and justify their request for privacy; apparently those that don’t have permanent documentation of their death threats are less entitled to privacy and safety.

The state as fail-deadly arbiter of privacy is an entirely abhorrent situation.

How to Cut Down on Unwanted Junk Mail https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/smarter-living/how-to-cut...

I get very little paper mail now except for companies that I already have accounts with (and who seem to believe that “paperless” doesn’t apply to the marketing departments).

This article reads like it was written by someone who's never tried to stop getting junk mail. I used to call the listed 1800 number on every piece of mail I got, return it with NATA written on it, etc... I never once got a single company to stop. There's literally nothing you can do to prevent it from coming at you, at least in my experience.

After I registered my new car in Colorado, I started getting a ton of mail from fake car warranty scams. I called them a few times to stop mailing this crap, but they just kept going anyways. It was an address I only stayed at very temporary, and the DMV was one of the only places that I gave that address, so I am pretty sure they are doing the same thing.

in TX if you get a run of the mill speeding ticket, you are inundated with law firms offering to represent you...not sure where the data is coming from, but its pretty annoying

That isn't unusual. NY and other states bordering Ontario sell driver data to the private company that operates the 407 toll highway. The galling thing is that most Canadian provinces have data privacy laws that prevent their own citizen's data from being shared with the same company.

I want to be outraged, But feel helpless. What can I do about this?

It really doesn't seem like there is anything you can do. Sure you can talk to your representative, but why are they going to bother dealing with something that such a small margin of their voters care about?

Call your reps. Seriously. It makes a difference.

Write an op-ed for your local paper.

Volunteer to register voters.

Subscribe to investigative news outlets and donate to ProPublica.

Attend marches and rallies.

You aren't powerless, but you have to exercise your power whether it's on the winning side or not. All battles in a democracy are losing battles until they aren't, but the tables don't turn unless people join.

I wouldn't treat my name and address as private information.

I have no problem with the phone book, there was a time when everybody's name number and address was published in a book they regularly left on your doorstep, it didn't seem like a huge invasion of privacy.

I do have a problem with the postal rates for mass mail and telemarketing laws – the real source of the issues here.

This is very annoying and disappointing. I am a resident in the Tampa, Fl area. There is no other option where I can get a new driver's licensed renew the title for my vehicle. Since I'm finding out about this now my guess is there is no opt-out option either. This sucks because I get rid of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp trying to secure my self a little bit. But I just get screwed in another way.

Welcome to Tampa! There's an opt out link at the bottom of the article that leads to one of the data users.

This is low, even for Florida.

I am fascinated by the steps that lead to such decisions. When someone initially mentioned this idea, no one in the chain objected? Like, no one took 10 seconds to pause and say, this is not right? If they did, they got overruled?

In my team of 7 people, it is nearly impossible to bring up dumb ideas without someone immediately poking a hole in it ...

When you more or less directly receive money by implementing a dumb idea, the incentives don't align to select them out.

States need money, taxes are politically unpopular, therefore this happens.

> I am fascinated by the steps that lead to such decisions. When someone initially mentioned this idea, no one in the chain objected? Like, no one took 10 seconds to pause and say, this is not right? If they did, they got overruled?

There are plenty of reasons:

-- Manager is a tyrant and no one wanted to get on his or her bad side.

-- Directors made this mandatory, with no room for negotiation

-- Government might be cash strapped and selling this kind of information might be in much-needed funds.

-- Government lawyers reviewed the legality of it and constructed an argument that could hold up in court.

California has created a dns database by dna sample from every newborn child. And sells drivers license photos too.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-biobank-dna-babies-w...

Texas DMV does the exact same thing.

Article: https://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/how-the-state-sells-y...

This is America.

One of the good things about GDPR is, when you give data away, you're responsible to make sure and control it's not misused. You can't blame the party which you gave the data to.

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