Hacker News Reader

Comment by spuz | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something? What do you mean the DMV makes tens of millions of dollars a year selling data to itself?

I used to work for my state's DMV. They'd sell vehicle registration data to various companies, which is how and why you get those "we've been trying to reach you about your car warranty" phone calls. I don't know about CA, but KY had a problem with tracking who ordered and who paid for that data. When I worked there, we found a number of "purchasers" who only paid for Year 1 but stopped paying afterwards.

Federal law requires state DMVs to supply that data to the car manufacturers. So if you own a Chevy, they have to send your data to Chevy in case there is a recall.

I suppose one other industry interested in this information is the bounty hunter industry (bail enforcement). I believe there are several platforms for licensed bounty hunters where they can receive this and similar information about a person/vehicle.

> there are several platforms

One such platform used to be called Vigilant Systems. They'd sell details of where a car has passed a police/Flock ALPR camera, mostly to repo companies, but also bail/bounty hunters. Using details of license plate scans are more up-to-date than the DMV registration. People on the run from courts are extremely unlikely to keep their vehicle registration or driving licenses up to date.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKxkokoQdkc&t=238

The governing law is Driver's Privacy Protection Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_Privacy_Protection_...

The DMV sells the data you give to the DMV. The DMV does not sell the data you give to the DMV to the DMV.

your positional encoding vector seems a bit off :D

Haha, damn not enough caffeine this morning to parse correctly

In guessing you can't choose to opt out ?

selling (data you give to the DMV) [to third parties], not selling (data you give) [to the DMV]

My awkward wording on things like this if nothing else I hope helps inspire confidence that I am in fact a human typing each of these characters by hand.

You fill out a form. The government sells the data on the form to someone who pays them money for it. There is no nuance here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com