The Oregon DMV took in $11.5M last year by selling your information | Hacker News Reader

The Oregon DMV took in $11.5M last year by selling your information

katu.com

49 pointsfortran7720 comments

Open articleView on HN

Related from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22013559

The title says Vermont, but the thread covers other states too.

Insurance companies buy your reports from states or 3rd party aggregators who bought from the states.

It can actually cost a lot. Oklahoma charges a hefty fee.

Some of this cost is passed back to the consumer through higher overall rates.

But because some people aren’t honest about their tickets and accidents, the reports help prevent clean drivers from subsidizing accident prone but not truthful drivers.

I see what you did there. The entire reason insurance company buys the data is to raise rates by zip code or whatever they do.

Now if the insurance is anyways f-ing me over, I might as well have the state/gov earn some money from it.

Ask the insurance company for some of their data and see if they provide for free

> "The DMV lets drivers know about that. It's in the DMV privacy act. How many people are actually looking at that, I don't know. But it's there,”

This is not informed consent. Being available if someone is already aware enough to know where and how to acquire the information is not sufficiently informative. There is a duty to ensure that your counter-party is aware of the all eventualities to the transaction that could materially harm their quality of life.

I believe that for all transactions where a party is acquiring data for use beyond the direct fulfillment of the immediate service to the counter-party, the party acquiring the data should require informed consent from the counter-party. Further, in the case of a person transacting with government, with potentially some carful circumscription for aspects of law enforcement, I believe the state should additionally carry the data equivalent to a fiduciary duty for that transaction.

Most states seem to do this.

Vermont: https://vtdigger.org/2019/11/25/how-vermonts-dmv-makes-milli...

Florida: https://www.fastcompany.com/90376510/floridas-dmv-is-selling...

California: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjekz/the-california-dmv...

Federal law apparently requires they provide the info to some clients, including insurance companies.

While this is worth writing an article about, the headline seems slanted to draw clicks.

I think a more accurate characterization would be as follows. By state law, some information in a licensed driver's record is public. The DMV regulates access to the information, and charges a fee for the service.

The point to emphasize -- and criticize -- is the law that says the information is public. This is the thing that has to be addressed if the situation needs to change.

The DMV is just executing that law, not, as implied by the headline, going rogue and nefariously trying to make some extra bucks by auctioning off citizens' info.

As an Oregonian, I am disappointed that is all they got.

Exactly this! I hope our data is worth more

This is happening in other states too. As soon as you title a new car, you start getting a ton more junk mail that's referring your make/model of car.

Are you sure this is from DMV records access and not the dealer? (I suppose it could easily be both.)

I'm guessing maybe both. I don't see why my dealer would want someone else trying to sell me a warranty extension; that competes directly with the dealer.

The dealer likely hit you with a warranty extension pitch during the sales process. So the only potential sales cannibalization would be from individuals that _might_ have purchased a warranty from the dealer after the sale. The guaranteed revenue from leasing out the list would more than likely makes up for that possibility, especially if it's coordinated at the manufacturer level.

Dealers will also hit you with warranty extension pitches shortly before your warranty expires. But you're right, they might be figuring that selling that info to competitors might net them more money than relying on their own sales tactics.

In my state, this happens even when you buy a car from a private person instead of a dealer.

Maybe it's because I only buy old cars, but I've bought a lot of them, and never had this happen once. This may depend on your state, I suppose...

However, when I purchased my new house, I immediately got sales people knocking at my door selling me Internet, security, pest control, etc and they all knew that I just moved in.

This is one of the things that happens when you don't raise taxes. (obviously it's more complicated than that...)

Is raising taxes preferable though? In the present scenario, taxes are lower, because the government is making up for it by selling my info to marketeers, who then try to sell me crap I don't want. I don't buy any of it, but a percentage of my more-gullible neighbors do. So, in effect, the more gullible citizens are subsidizing the smarter or at least more frugal ones. Alternatively, if the government stopped selling info and jacked up taxes, I'd lose out on this subsidization. I don't see how this is really a benefit to me. Basically, it amounts to a "stupid tax".

Like I said, of course it's more complicated than that. Also, I will point out, that we are all "stupid" at some point. For instance young people and elderly people are more susceptible to scams/advertisement. If you think you will never be elderly, that's fine, but maybe I want my parents to be protected.

Personally, I don't think elderly people who've become gullible have any business operating a motor vehicle. It's a massive failure of our society that not being stuck at home in most places requires a car, and this should be fixed. This would also mostly eliminate the need for a DMV.

All states do this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com