Florida inacted tough laws to gather personal info in the DMV, and then sold them to a private co.!

[The Backlash Cometh]

Oh, and the name of the private company? Shadowsoft.


Florida sued over sale of drivers' personal information
A lawsuit against the state of Florida over the sale of personal driver's license information to a private firm may proceed as a class action, a federal judge has ruled.

The suit claims the state, specifically the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, improperly sold personal information gleaned from about 31 million driver's license records to Shadowsoft Inc., an Irving, Texas-based Internet marketer. Shadowsoft then sold the information to other firms that target consumers.

The records sales, which a lawyer in the case said brought in a large yet unspecified amount of money to the state, took place between 2005 through 2009.

Such sales, however, violate a federal statute banning the disclosure of personal information from driver's licenses, said Howard Bushman, an attorney with the Miami law firm representing the affected drivers. The information released included addresses, dates of birth and possibly Social Security numbers, Bushman said.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/fl-dmv-class-action-suit-20101129,0,650861.story


- - - - - - -

This is incredible! I went late to the DMV to renew my Driver's License this year and had to come up with seven pieces of identification, including my birth certificate which was scanned in a machine! And now I hear the DMV sold this information last year. (Nothing about whether it extended to this year.) However, what's really weird is that I read in the paper that this heightened document requirement applied to everyone, yet, a few months later, my husband went in without being required to produce the same information that I had to produce.

What is going on with the Florida DMV?