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Replying To:
An Opt-out That Isn't (none / 0) (#5)
by Anonymous User on Mon May 24, 2004 at 11:51:06 PM PDT

I can tell you as a former employee of Florida DHSMV in Tallahasee that even the opt-out process referred to here will not necessarily block your information from being sold to corporate marketers. What it does block is YOU and other individuals from accessing your information. Read the "DPPA Exceptions" at DHSMV's web site (http://www.hsmv.state.fl.us/ddl/dppa.html) very carefully and you will see several loopholes that allow most any large company to obtain your contact info. And whereas the cost for you to get a copy of your own information is several dollars, they get it for a few cents per since they are usually buying millions of people's records at a time. In addition, unless they've changed it in the last couple of years (and I've heard nothing to say they have), updates to the DHSMV database are copied to a private vendor's system nightly who then resells the info in smaller chunks to other businesses. This outsourcing practice has been going on for many years and brings in over $1 million a month in revenue for the department. The big stink a few years ago about the department selling Driver License pictures to a company to be used in their checkout line ID-verification system was a great red-herring. The contract was immediately terminated and the public thought their identities were safe. In truth, allowing highly restricted use of the pictures in security products like this would have better protected the public from identity theft. Instead, this technology was soundly rejected while protecting the sale of the REAL threat which is the data. Remember that the picture is useless without the matching data since it cannot be searched on (at least not yet). The data however, is usually the most important component of a mass-marketer's merge-and-purge process since it is far more accurate than most commercial mailing lists.


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