The saddest part of all this is that the California DMV is making only $50m/yr — that’s literally about $1/yr for each Californian, a little more if you only count driving-age residents, and probably less if you count cars, not people — at what cost?

Stalkers, murders, debt collectors, etc., lives made easier / possible?

A sad state of affairs.

Do you think stalkers and murderers are commonly using this data? It sounds like they passed a law to prevent this type of issue from happening again.

This data doesn't seem that sensitive or difficult to obtain via other methods depending on the exact situation. You should check out the system that the repo industry uses to track vehicle location via license plate scanning.

This data doesn't seem that sensitive or difficult to obtain via other methods depending on the exact situation.

A government should not be in the business of betraying its citizens to private parties, even if those parties have other means to accomplish their goals. Should I expect them to start selling school records and police interactions next?

Does it have to be common for it to be a problem? Since they shouldn't be doing it in the first place, if even one person gets stalked using this data that's one too many.

That occurred before the law was implemented. The law put restrictions on who could access the information and for what purposes. That's why I'm asking if it is still a problem.

Also, using the 'one is too many' argument is not valid. We could apply that to outlaw cars, electricity, or any other thing that is accepted as useful but also kills people. The DPPA law allows debt collectors, repo men, and other neccessary societal systems to function while providing protection for the data. If there have been only a handful of incidents over the years, then I think it would still be a net gain for society. If there is a better way to regulate the data and still allow the systems in society to function, that would be great to explore, but I don't see any obvious improvements.

The DPPA law allows debt collectors, repo men, and other neccessary societal systems to function

You're wrong. They can function just fine without data from the DVM. Therefore, anybody being harmed by the sale of this data is one too many because there is nothing to offset this harm. Some harm is acceptable when it's offset by something else, like the utility of cars. That is not the case here.

How can they function without it? If you have a PI serve a subpeona, they need to know the address.

Also, where is your evidence that someone has be hurt?

How can they function without it?

Work a little bit harder doing some old fashioned detective work instead of just paying the DMV for their records? It's a bit more work for them but I don't give a damn. Your suggestion that they'd be up shit creek without the DMV is just flat wrong.

Most other similar societies around the world do not allow this, yet PIs and process servers still exist.

I don’t know about commonly, but the law mentioned in the article you cite carved out an exception for private investigators, so...

I’m not excited about license plate tracking either, but I have different expectations of the data I leak by going about town, compared with the complete personal information that I must give to a state agency (on top of paying them, on top of them receiving state funding) to have the privilege of going (driving, I guess) about town.

The article has a clear bias towards vilifying the release of the data and misleads you with their use of the word "exception". They are not truly excepted from the law, rather they are on a list of approved actors/purposes. This section on PIs dictates that they can only access this information for DPPA approved reasons, and providing the location of a person without it being related to one of the approves uses (like that stalker) is illegal, so...

They use machine learning with your license plate data so that they can predict where your home address, where you work, home of people you associate with, etc.

What expectations do you have with the DMV? They didn't break any laws or privacy policies. Was it just an assumption you made?

Why is this downvoted?

Being allowed by the law to do something bad does not make it right, it just shows the law is bad.

Selling private data is bad, no matter how legal it is, in most of the world. See GDPR as an example.

Your argument assumes that selling data is bad. What supports your position?

Edit: in the context of the CA DMV releasing data under the DPPA law.

Data is personal property that is being handled without consent and without regard for social problems. There needs to be a hard stop put towards those practices.

Why not have mandatory public webcams in everyone's homes?

Two reasons; privacy is axiomatically a human right (since it's an axiom you can unilaterally disagree, just as with any other human right), and caused harm arguments that the information is available in a way that can cause your physical harm (when you cannot escape a stalker, or a general class of invasive people if you're a celebrity or piss off qanon).

The concept itself. It is being sold without my express consent. I'm being given no share of the profit that someone else is making from my information.

Read the Ebay stalking indictment. They were the B team with extremely limited operational capability. Now imagine they had any of the following, which are all for sale:

* Real-time location from your cell provider

* Real-time AirBnB booking

* Real-time purchases from credit card companies

* Real-time browsing records from your mobile ISP, home ISP, and behavioral advertising networks

* Your complete prescription history from your pharmacy

This is truly the stuff of nightmares. Part of the problem with government data sales is that it normalizes morally abhorrent practices that would not have been tolerated just a few years ago.

Yep, and the transaction flows the other way too. The government also buys data from databrokers who get it from companies like Facebook, Google, and the data you mentioned.

This data doesn't seem that sensitive or difficult to obtain via other methods

So it's ok because there's more than one there's more than one way to get the data?

Living in California is really like living in a developing country with all the government corruption. On top of this nonsense California has among the highest DMV fees in the country

The system makes much more sense if you assume the goal of government corruption is a wealth transfer to for the (politically connected subset of the) upper and middle classes and assume high DMV fees are a sin tax.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

I'm not saying that welfare for a subset of the people who can pay their own way and high sin taxes on essential services are good government policy (I personally think the combination is farcically regressive), just that the system makes sense if you take that viewpoint.

I completely agree, government is primarily being used as a way to make transfer payments from one group of people to another these days.

i live in California and collect old (literally: project, mostly european) cars. The Cal DMV are a nightmare to deal with despite the vibrant local car culture which is slowly dying for all but the rich due to the DMV and other bureaucracy. There is a fee and a form every time you exhale, it's getting worse and you have wait hours to be charged at their offices.

Maybe the goal is just to get people to skirt the law and accept the legal ambiguity hanging over their head that comes with that? They're basically saying "fine, be a small time car flipper if you want but know that you are giving the state the authority to destroy your life at any time on whim". This is what police states that want to have the power of arbitrary enforcement do.

I'm not saying CA is there yet but if you look at asinine policies from all the various states and their level of compliance it seems pretty clear that huge swaths of "perfectly fine when done reasonably" normal and common behaviors are more or less impossible to do while being legally in the clear. At what point does an unenforceable at scale policy become a backhanded infringement upon people's property rights?

Also an older euro car fan, no longer a CA resident. What are you stuck with besides standard registration?

I know post 75 cars have to be smogged with factory equipment if using the stock engine (though I don’t know how the hell your average smog tech knows the factory setup for an 1980 Lancia Beta).

What are you stuck with besides standard registration?

I've never done one for CA but some states make it hell to go from "car with no paperwork last owned by a dead person and last registered years ago" to "car with proper paperwork to sell/register" so for someone repairing old cars to flip that can cause a significant headache.

I had to sell my old euro car (to an out-of-stater) when I moved to CA because despite miraculously meeting strict CA smog guidelines it never had to meet in its decades of existence, it had non-approved (i.e. $CA stamped$) parts in it and failed the "visual". Clean-blowing, perfectly functional car, had to sell it anyway. I'm still bitter.

Have you ever spent serious time actually living in a developing country? Do you truly believe California, the richest state in the US, is on par with a developing country because of their high DMV fees? Please think of those living in truly oppressive situations, or in brutal poverty, before making such generalizations.

I grew up in a developing country. In some ways (e.g. quality of roads or number of homeless per mile) my home country is even better than California. Have you lived in a developing country? (Hint: It's not as bad as you think) The fact that it's kinda of comparable to California in some ways while California is collecting so much tax on top of federal budget is baffling.

I would imagine if we compared literacy rate, infant mortality rate, life expectancy, median net worth, retirement age, etc, we'd start to find some stark differences between california and a "developing country," though I'm curious what we define as "developing country."

This from my time living on the border of Mexico. Everyone always talked about how the roads on our side were as bad as on Mexico's side as a criticism of texan infrastructure. It's fair, by the way, American infrastructure is a mess. But then the life expectancy was like ten years lower just a couple miles away because of an invisible line (and a fence you could easily hop over with a ladder).

This smells of untrue American exceptionalism. Being a very well traveled person with a spouse from a developing country that we travel to often, I would expect so-called “poorer” countries to do better on nearly all of those metrics you list (the exception being median net worth, unless you correct for cost of living in which case California lags behind on all metrics listed).

Did you know that life expectancy of Cubans is higher than that of Americans?

It’s most likely not. Doctors in Cuba self-report aggregate statistics and are penalized if they underperform. That tells you all you need to know.

https://www.econlib.org/about-that-cuban-life-expectancy/

Independent studies have shown giant anomalies in other metrics that suggest the favorable metrics are being fudged:

https://mobile.twitter.com/wwwojtekk/status/1233017228792082...

Also a lot of reports that women are pressured to get late term abortions if there are any potential issues observed with the fetus, as this will ensure it doesn’t count as a mortality and not hurt that clinic’s stats.

Careful with that argument though, some of this is based on US propaganda.

The data is not sold to the public. You must be a private investigator, lawyer, debt collector or other limited party. The data is used mainly to find people and enforce their legal obligations. It's been going on for many years and is widely known. I'm surprised this is a story.

In theory it is not sold to the public. In practice, it isn't hard for motivated members of the public to figure out how to get access.

I personally know someone who was a victim of stalking back in the 90s. Her stalker managed to find out where she lived by getting it from the California DMV. The only way she found to block it was to move and have her car owned by someone else so that there would be no DMV record.

The result is that while this is not new, it really should be a story.

It's also not that hard to get the information from other sources too.

If your scenario happened in the 90s, it might have been before the DPPA law took effect.

The author has a clear bias and is using an event that took place before the protections were in place to further their agenda.

The law restricts the public from getting this information precisely because of stalking. The Drivers Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1994.

its easy to get this stuff. You can just pay some anonymous person on Fiverr that has access.

Nobody should have access to this without a warrant, its a huge invasion of privacy.

Everything about you is public, whether you like it or not. Until legal rights to own your own data exist it will be freely bought and sold to the highest/lowest bidder. It isn't how things should be, but it is how they are for now.

DMV needs to be outsourced to the auto insurers who earn off of applications. This way we don't end up with 1 location for an entire city.

Government DMV workers: 'Your paperwork has been denied because you forgot form 12A-T3, you dumb idiot.'

Private DMV run by Google: 'Your paperwork has been denied because our classifier says you're a scammer. We won't tell you why. You are forbidden from ever trying again.'

Arizona has "authorized 3rd party" providers who can do 90% what the DMV does. They charge a "convenience fee" but is totally worth it since there is never a line and they are all over the place. It seems to strike a good balance between private/public operations.

https://azdot.gov/motor-vehicles/mvd-hours-and-locations/aut...

Same thing in California. I've been doing my DMV business at AAA for more than a decade.

Is this really a good thing? We're empowering a whole slew of companies to "compete" in an arena simply by the virtue of government's dysfunctional and incompetent services?

What this does is punishes people who cannot pay convenience fees (how much or how little that is orthogonal) and rewards people who can.

This is an extremely sad state of affairs where privatization of something that government is supposed to provide with reasonable quality and timely manner.

This is why our country is compared to third world. Because of shit like this.

California also takes a mandatory blood sample at birth and they sell it to research firms.

Citation needed.

Is this the first time a US Gov't org was caught selling data to the private sector?

Does anyone have another/earlier example?

Interesting... One would expect such things to be happening in some heavy republican we-love-business state, but not in democratic California?

The CA Secretary of State also sells voter information, per California Elections Code section 2194(3). The cost is $1 per thousand records, up to $30 (unclear if that's for the whole state, or if you can't request more than 30k records).

The information is only supposed to be used for political, scholarly, or journalistic purposes. There doesn't seem to be a way to opt out.

The California DMV told Motherboard "the DMV does not sell information, but recovers the cost of providing information as allowed by law."

This comment seems like a lie, or at the least sly misdirection. According to this article the DMV is making 50M a year and openly admits that they redirect profits to other initiatives, they're not just "recovering the cost".

It's like saying, "I'm a software engineer, I sit at home and recoup the cost of sitting at my computer all day."

seems like a lie

Also known as doublespeak.

If we allow lies to be spoken in our presence, we are complicit.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?10449-1/doublespeak

According to this article the DMV is making 50M

That was $50M in revenue, not profit. I blame the Vice headline; it said "makes," but in the article clarified that it's revenue.

That's a lot of revenue

It's really not. Think about what this information is used for: It's probably pulled by your insurance whenever you take out a new policy. There's 40 million people in California. If 5% of them change insurance each year (2 million), and that report costs $25 (A reasonable filing fee for a sensitive government document), there's your $50 million right there.

Really? This seems like a pretty clear explanation to me.

They are required by law to provide information. That's not selling... that's just complying with their obligation to provide certain data.

And they charge a fee for it.

In other words, if you want to prevent them from providing information, you need to change the laws requiring they share information.

Don't most DMVs do this?

If so then that is a bigger story, not less of one.

I mean, maybe, but it's not news.