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TheKeyboardKid OP t1_j19xw6w wrote

Reply to comment by Madhavaz in TIL that DMVs in the US are allowed to sell some of your personal information and do. This practice is legal under federal law. For example, Florida’s DMV made $77 million and California’s DMV made $52 million in 2017 through this practice alone. by TheKeyboardKid

Oh I didn’t know that either! Double TIL! Do you have a link to an article so not only I can see, but others can too?

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Madhavaz t1_j19yme0 wrote

>Have you ever wondered how junk mail follows you so easily when you move to a new address? How do credit card companies, catalogs, charities seeking money and everyone else all know when you have moved across town or across the country entirely?

>Whenever you fill out a change of address form with the United States Postal Service, the USPS adds your new details into a database of 160 million previous address changes over the past four years. The USPS has deals with data brokers to sell this data to anyone who pays, provided they have your old address. That means data firms cannot buy the address of Leroy Jones in Cincinnati, but can obtain his new address if they know where he used to live, which they usually do anyway.

Source: How The Post Office Sells Your Address Update To Anyone Who Pays (And The Little-Known Loophole To Opt Out)

And the USPS has a very poor history of safeguarding consumers data.

>The US Postal Service says it’s fixed a security weakness on usps.com that let anyone see the personal account info of its users, including usernames and street addresses. The open vulnerability was reportedly identified over a year ago by an independent researcher but USPS never patched it until this week, when Krebs on Security flagged the issue.

>The vulnerability included all 60 million user accounts on the website. It was caused by an authentication weakness in the site’s application programming interface (API) that allowed anyone to access a USPS database offered to businesses and advertisers to track user data and packages. 

Source: USPS took a year to fix a vulnerability that exposed all 60 million users’ data

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DavoTB t1_j1b3fng wrote

Thanks for the links to these articles…excellent info.

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KmartQuality t1_j1eoe49 wrote

" Other companies incorporate the information into their comprehensive dossiers on almost all Americans (one leader in the field, Acxiom, recently said it would allow consumers to see their individual dossiers for the first time from the end of the summer)."

Is there any movement on this offer?

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