It used to be very common for various state and local government agencies, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, to sell their records, containing vasts amounts of personally identifiable information (PII), as a revenue stream. That changed when Rebecca Schaeffer’s stalker killed her in 1989 after paying $250 to get her address, and other PII on file, from the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
After this horrible, tragic demonstration of how very bad things can happen when people have full reign to get access to PII, states started enacting drivers protection acts to keep the PII the agencies had on file from being accessed in such egregiously irresponsible ways. Finally, a U.S. federal law, the Drivers Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) was enacted to help protect the PII in drivers’ records.
So, I found the following inappropriate release from a state agency to be very interesting…

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