After last week’s Congressional hearings with Facebook, we are all starting to think about our personal information and our privacy. Personal information and its privacy is an important topic and we need to protect that information.
We are aware that some social media sites sell your information to other companies to use in multiple ways. What about our driver’s license information?
Each state issues a drivers license to residences within that state. Beyond your name and address is your date of birth, your driving record and that links to what you drive. There is quite of bit of information that we entrust to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).
According to a recent study, identity theft hit an all-time high in 2016 and one in six U.S. adults were a victim. The biggest prize for an identity thief is your date of birth and drivers license information. Thieves want this information because then they can open up credit card accounts, cell phone contracts, and bank loans all under your name. Social security numbers are also prime targets. Both of these pieces of information can be obtained from your driver’s license. Therefore, this information needs to remain secure.
In 1994, the Drivers Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) was enacted to protect the personal information assembled by your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.
Under DPPA, personal information about an individual in connection with a motor vehicle record is prohibited for release or use by the DMV. DPPA also requires states to obtain permission from individuals before their personal record may be sold or released to third-party marketers.
With the advent of current state experiments with digital driver’s licenses and REAL ID, which connects information into a vast national database, and with some states selling information to marketers at the highest bidder, protection of personal data is moving in exactly the wrong direction.
This is just one of the very many examples that may alert you. In November 2017, Austin television station KXAN investigated and found that Texas made $2.1 million per year by selling information to marketers. KXAN also found that some of the businesses that bought data had been hacked. The biggest: Equifax.
This may explain how we all get emails, phone calls and letters for extended warranty companies, financing options, and insurance companies.
The right to privacy is not what this is about, it is not technologies fault, we have to be aware of what information we give away. The next step is to have a way to opt out of the release of this type of information. After this weeks hearings, let us hope this is the next step.
Reference: https://www.epic.org/privacy/drivers/
