Driver’s License a Road to Loss of Privacy?
At first glance, it’s just another laminated plastic card, if a very fancy one. It bears the usual driver information: name, address, height, weight, birth date. But it also has a machine-readable magnetic stripe, like a credit card, and over-the-face, see-through, flashing holograms of the state seal and the motor vehicle department’s logo.
Ten percent of California’s 25 million drivers have this high-tech version of a driver’s license, and states from North Dakota to New York are developing their own. Its advantages: security, durability, automated identification and the potential for instant access to database information. Some day it could even pay your water bill.
Such advantages make privacy advocates nervous. They worry about cards that make it easier to collect and disseminate information. They worry more about motor vehicle departments, which have a history of disseminating anything to anybody. Some even worry about the magnetic stripe, bearing unknown information readable only by machine.
To some extent, the cards are part of the effort to automate at the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which could use some automation. The data on the card, including photo and signature, is stored in central databases, easily retrievable for an updated or duplicate license. Anyone wanting to change name or address or replace a lost card could theoretically do so without going into a DMV office.
The cards are also supposed to be more secure: The flashing holograms, for one thing, make them hard to counterfeit. But the ability to order new or corrected cards by call alone would make it possible for anyone to pose as the given driver, and the DMV knows it. “The department is addressing that now,” says Tony Walker, DMV project leader for the mag stripe program.
For law enforcement officers, the cards could save on time and errors. When they stop someone, they can run the card through a “swipe reader” that reads the three mag stripe tracks and prints out the identification on a ticket form--as the Highway Patrol is already doing in a pilot program in Ventura County. With a database connection, they can someday get instant access to other records as well, right from the road.
Miscreants won’t like this, of course, preferring to hide their past violations or criminal history while they argue for lenience. But many ordinary people are also disturbed, simply because they don’t know what’s on the mag stripe and fear they could be carrying around personally detrimental information.
Retailers with credit card-reading terminals can already read the magnetic stripe, if only the second, or “financial” track, which provides driver’s license number, expiration date and birth date. With some software adjustment, they could also print out this data on the back of checks.
It’s retailer access, actually, that most disturbs privacy advocates, who have always worried about the retail community’s “capturing” information from credit card sales, linking the purchaser to his specific purchases for later use or sale to telemarketers. But people who paid by check would, until now, give the machine no means of capturing the identifying data.
All people aren’t so concerned about telemarketers, knowing they can just say no. Similarly, junk mail can be thrown away. These marketing pitches aren’t really personal: The names go directly from lists to Addressographs or dialing machines, often unseen, quickly forgotten. Personally, I wouldn’t even mind if the Highway Patrol had my purchase records and knew right up front that I shop Loehmann’s, not Saks.
But let’s blue-sky this whole business. The DMV could conceivably (in return for commissions) hitch its licensees to credit or debit card networks. The new card “absolutely has that possibility,” says Nick Denice, president of NBS Imaging Systems in Indiana, which makes the cards. “The mag stripe is capable of including an account number.” The DMV could then collect and sell its own data on expenditures.
These are only possibilities, not current plans. But in California, as in other states, both driver’s license and registration listings are already sold in bulk to commercial list makers, which computer-manipulate them into useful groupings by age, ZIP Code, make of car, who knows what else?
These listings are considered public record. Until recently, California, like many states, even sold them individually, providing an address and phone number to match any name, and the address, phone number and name to go with any car’s license number. One just had to ask, pay a few bucks and state some reason for the request that didn’t mention murder or assault. It was only after actress Rebecca Schaeffer was killed by someone who got her address from the DMV that home addresses became confidential, or at least available only to a more select list of approved businesses.
Given this record, the future possibilities should give one pause. But not to worry. “All we’ve done,” says Walker, “is make (the card) electronically acceptable.”
It’s not the end, but without careful restrictions now, it could be a beginning.
