This year, the California DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) made a whopping $50,000,000 selling California drivers license information. This includes all basic information such as name, address, and car registration. California has about 27,000,000 driver licenses and makes about $2.00 per record released. This means they’ve already sold about 25,000,000 sets of driver license information.
The big question: who’s buying them? Generally, insurance companies, vehicle manufacturers, and prospective employees but they are also known to sell to private investigators hired to sniff out cheating spouses and the like.
While many DMVs have confirmed to have cut off data access to certain commercial requests, possibly from companies selling products and looking to use driver license data to establish a better demographic for marketing, California is not one of them. Digital privacy experts, some senators, and Senator & Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders have openly expresses distaste in the practice of DMVs profiting from selling driver license information.
via VICE