Below is a letter the ACLU of Florida sent to Gov. Scott last week requesting he stop the practice of selling the personal information of Florida drivers to private companies. The letter had been referenced in recent news coverage.
According to news coverage, Florida is collecting between $62 and $73 million annually from the sale of personal information from Florida’s driver’s licenses to private data mining and other companies. This information includes your home address, age and gender.
Although the practice appears to be legal under exemptions in state and federal law, the state is not required to sell this information and we believe has the ability to stop the practice immediately.
July 22, 2011
Dear Governor Scott,
The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles continues to sell the personal information of Florida drivers without their knowledge or permission.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida asks you to immediately direct Julie L. Jones, Executive Director of the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, to discontinue the mass sale of personal driver license information such as home address, age, gender and identifying driver’s license number.
All Floridians, including drivers, have an expectation of privacy. Selling personal data without notice or permission violates that expectation. Florida drivers do not give their personal, identifying information to the state so it can be sold and re-sold to private companies.
Although courts have deemed the sale of some driver’s license information permissible under the Driver Privacy Protection Act, no law requires the state to do what your administration is currently doing – putting our personal data on the open information market.
As Governor, you should protect our personal information, not sell it.
Since the corporations that buy this personal data from the state are permitted to re-sell the information they acquire, the personal information of millions of Florida drivers is made available to third party purchasers with no official oversight. Even if it was sold legally the first time, Floridians have little assurance that information about them will be used appropriately or legally by future buyers.
The policy and practice of the state of making personal data available to private buyers, which your administration is continuing, puts every Florida driver at risk of becoming a victim of identity theft or fraud.
Perhaps most importantly, Floridians should be able to trust that their elected and appointed leaders will protect and honor their security and privacy. Your administration undermines that trust by continuing to allow the transfer of personal information such as home addresses and gender to those who are willing to pay for it.
We believe, and a great many Floridians agree, that no financial incentive can reasonably justify the invasion of privacy that results from the state selling such personal information.
Just because the state can do something, does not mean the state should do it.
We ask that you direct the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to end its contracts to sell the personal information of Florida drivers, not approve any future sales of this information and immediately put notifications and safeguards in place to ensure the information the state has already sold is safe and being used legally.
In short, we ask that you, Governor Scott, end the practice of effectively selling our privacy to private companies.
Thank you for your consideration,
Howard Simon