Publicly private

Perhaps you are troubled because you don’t fully understand the recent 1,000-word explanations from your financial institutions, which assure you that worrying about privacy is their job and that you should spend your days enjoying the benefits of allowing them to share your personal information. At least, you might think as you lay your head lightly upon your pillow and drift to sleep with this comforting thought, the 1994 Driver Privacy Protection Act, as amended in 1999, is preventing marketers from getting their hands on my personal information through my motor vehicle registration.

Boy, will you be unhappy when you wake up.

A recent caller from Pittsfield, who not long ago registered a snowmobile, certainly was. He discovered, for one thing, that just because it is a vehicle and just because it has a motor doesn’t mean it is a motor vehicle, according to the Legislature, which also excludes all-terrain vehicles and boats from the privacy laws. That means marketers can do as they’ve always done – buy from the state details about the owners of these vehicles. Maine even made it easier not long ago to conduct sales by offering an online service called InforME and makes about $900,000 a year on the sale of information.

Lawmakers would have to draw the line on vehicles somewhere, of course (would riding lawnmowers otherwise qualify?) but it is fair to conclude that as the public comes to understand just how little privacy it has, the federal and state protections under DPPA need a bit of work. For example, the current safeguards prevent personal information from going to sales and marketing organizations unless a person specifically agrees to release it. But clearinghouses for insurance companies, vehicle manufacturers, private detectives, towing companies and employers can still verify personal information through registrations, so privacy for these compulsory records is limited.

More to the point, marketers apparently can use this information with little to fear. According to Rebecca Wyke, assistant secretary of state, compliance is “almost like this honor system.” A clearinghouse agrees not to use or to let others use the information for marketing but no one is checking to make sure they don’t and no one has been prosecuted for it.

Given that the original law was not to stop marketers but stalkers – who could find where their victims lived through vehicle plates – the loose federal standards for enforcement provide a false sense of security. And because marketing and sales people use the state-required data base to pitch products to people like the snowmobile owner in Pittsfield, an expanded definition of privacy should be explored to include other types of vehicles as well as providing tougher or at least more specific rules for enforcement. And, certainly, the public should be made aware that what state and federal governments call private might be different than the general view.