301–310 of 351 posts
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The site you linked to is not affiliated with any state DMV. It links to a sketchy background check service that appears to be a scam. Edit: spelling
The link was preceded by the words "from any of several dozen commercial providers that resell government data:" so that's how I took it. It would be at a .gov domain if it were state affiliated.
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> This is actually almost entirely public data Birthday is an included item. That's definitely private as it is often used to confirm identity. "almost public" is meaningless. One data item, like credit card number, or birthday, can make this a dangerous leak.
Birthday is almost certainly public. You can get it easily from the DMV or from any of several dozen commercial providers that resell government data: https://www.dmv.org/public-records/ That it's used to confirm identity shows how weak identity-theft protections are at most institutions, not what's public information. (For that matter, mother's maiden name is basically public information as well: you can get it from…
The solution to all of this data privacy hysteria is to change our approach. The possession of common facts about a person should not be sufficient to masquerade as that person.
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> I've never consented to release my birthday publicly. Too bad. The government doesn't care about you consenting to things. In fact, making you do things without your consent is literally the entire point of organized government, even if we usually overlook that because it's for a good purpose (for example, taxation to pay for health care or national defense).
You're off topic. The government hasn't released my birthday. I question their data security practices, but any release of such information would be considered a mistake. I don't care if you think paying for health care or national security is important or not. That's an unrelated issue to whether or not Birthday is private or public data.
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Um, yes. It certainly is. I don't want it released publicly, nor have I consented to release it to any website. If there are websites out there sharing that private information, they're doing it without my consent.
You may consider it private, but that doesn't make it legally private. Which is the kind of privacy under discussion in this thread.
Is your daily schedule, when you go to work,drop off your kids, what route you take to work protected legally? No, but you probably wouldn't want to share that information publicly either. Yet, in the future, a data breach could reveal such information, and a business could seek to resell it.
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Would you like to share your full name and birthday with the world? I wouldn't. Therefore it is private.
That would disclose way more information than just my name and age. You would then be able to associate that information with my HN username and all the data associated with it.
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No kidding, but I don't want that information out there, and I imagine most people don't. Just because some skeezy website shares all my personal information does not make it public information. It's private to me and I'd rather it remain undistributed, where possible. Overall point being, this US voter data leak is bad. That appears to have released information on all of us that we consider private.
> Just because some skeezy website shares all my personal information does not make it public information. I kinda think it does mean exactly that. Just because you don't want something to be public doesn't mean that it isn't public.
Nothing about the definition of public or private restrict either to being protected by the government. I can consider some information private without it being protected in the legal sense.
That said, I expect that any government entity that released my birthday would be held responsible for a data leak.
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You're off topic. The government hasn't released my birthday. I question their data security practices, but any release of such information would be considered a mistake. I don't care if you think paying for health care or national security is important or not. That's an unrelated issue to whether or not Birthday is private or public data.
How do you know if your birthday isn't in some publicly accessible government database somewhere? Did you try to find it? Did you hire a private investigator (who has quick access to all those databases) and ask them if they can find your birthday?
If it's true that that information is out in the wild now, then I expect government to tighten their tech security procedures.
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You're off topic. The government hasn't released my birthday. I question their data security practices, but any release of such information would be considered a mistake. I don't care if you think paying for health care or national security is important or not. That's an unrelated issue to whether or not Birthday is private or public data.
How do you know if your birthday isn't in some publicly accessible government database somewhere? Did you try to find it? Did you hire a private investigator (who has quick access to all those databases) and ask them if they can find your birthday?
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"from the DMV"? no. > DMV.org is a privately owned website that is not owned or operated by any state government agency.
DMV as in Department of Motor Vehicles. Many states have names like that hence "DMV"
Want the name, age, gender, home address, mailing address, party of registration, and voter history from every registered voter in North Carolina? Here is the "leak" on Amazon S3. http://dl.ncsbe.gov/index.html?prefix=data/
Except, by leak, I mean, link I got from my state board of elections' homepage.