Drivers’ license data sold to businesses, given to Feds
January 5, 2020 in News by RBN Staff
source: papersplease.org
As we start the year of the once-a-decade US Census, it’s an appropriate time to start looking at some of the ways and the purposes for which data — including drivers license data — is used and shared by the Bureau of the Census.
State agencies that issue drivers’ licenses want us not to object to their demands for more and more personal information about matters unrelated to driving — digital photos, scans of birth certificates and social security cards, etc. — in order to obtain drivers’ licenses that comply with the Federal REAL-ID Act.
State driver licensing agencies say we shouldn’t worry — notwithstanding the requirement of the REAL-ID Act that drivers’ license and state ID data be made available electronically to all other states — because this data will only be shared “as permitted by law”.
But what does that mean? What sharing of this data does the law permit?
Recent reports show that drivers’ license data can be, and is, widely shared with both commercial entities and Federal agencies — including the Bureau of the Census, which will be conducting the decennial census in 2020 — for purposes unrelated to motor vehicle operation or drivers’ licenses. Both Federal and state agencies say that all of this is permitted by the Drivers Privacy Protection Act (DPPA).
According to reports by Vice.com based on responses to requests for state public records, selling drivers’ license data to for-profit businesses, mainly private investigators and debt collectors, is a major profit center for state driver licensing agencies. In California alone, the state Department of Motor Vehicles is making $50 million dollars a year selling drivers’ personal information to businesses for their private, commercial uses. There’s nothing illegal about this, says the DMV.
Meanwhile, those same state agencies are using automated facial recognition software to search their databases of digital photos of drivers for persons of interest to Federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other components of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This too is legal, they say.
Data about drivers licenses issued to undocumented California residents — who might wrongly think they had opted out of, or been excluded from, REAL-ID Act data sharing — has been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify, track down, and deport immigrants.
