I’m making a collection of model aggregators; i.e. firms that collect information about a group of people from many parties and then turn around and reveal that to another group.
The New York State driver’s license system is interesting. The regulations that govern the revealing of driver’s license information are found in a law: DPPA or Driver Privacy Protection Act. “Permissible use” enumerates who’s allowed to get the data. Boy! They permit revealing to a lot of parties.
I was particularly struck by LENS; or License Event Notification System. It appears that you can get a speeding ticket on the way to work and before you get into the office your boss’s Human Resources department can know about it. And people complain about inefficient government!
Here some other examples:
- The social security death index
- The North Carolina Medical professionals registry
- Board Certified Medical proffesionals
- Experian – Credit Reporting
- HIPPA’s – Unique Health Identifier for Individuals
- Medical Information Bureau
- Export regulation’s denied person’s list
- SMS Alibi Clubs
I’d love to know about other examples!
Making a collection of members of this species is helps in discovering a list of what attributes they tend to have. Here’s a very short list, as an example.
- Event notification.
- Permissible use.
- Dispute resolution.
- Foo Privacy Protection Act (i.e. DPPA, HIPPA, …)
A future so bright there is no place to hide!
My guess is LENS notification isn’t immediate; the DMV doesn’t know about the conviction until a court reports it, which is unlikely to be on the day of the arrest. Where I work, the typical turnaround from traffic stop to driving record is in the range of three weeks to two months. Some take years.
DPPA everywhere is pretty much like NY’s. For the record, we DMV bureaucrats spend a lot of time worrying about permissible record access; finding an appropriate balance between privacy and the public’s right to know is not an easy thing.
Finally: You might want to pick some state’s website and search for Uniform Commercial Code.
Joel – Thanks for the informed opinion. Dumb of me to forget that there is another stage in the information pipeline so that the traffic violations don’t go straight from the policeman’s cruiser to the DMV; but stop off for a period of time in the courts.
I agree that finding the balance is not easy. Part of my interest is in how the parties in these information market are configured. The public information databases are a good case study because they are more transparent about their operations.
That said even those have a tough problem getting the balance of negotiating power between information sources and the information consumers. Rare for those being modeled to be well represented at the table, Common for those aggregating the models, and those consuming the models to be. represented.
That makes me suspect that the all so many “privacy protection acts” are become biased toward the latter two classes of participants concerns.