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Comment by itake | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

> 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.

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