Madhavaz

Madhavaz t1_j1asbws wrote

Reply to comment by Bobrakis 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

You are absolutely correct. As soon as you used it at the Cheesecake Factory they knew it was an active number and they started in.

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Madhavaz t1_j19yme0 wrote

Reply to comment by TheKeyboardKid 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

>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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Madhavaz t1_j19xfsc wrote

Reply to 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

Yup. And so does the United States Postal Service. As soon as you hand over the change of address form they sell that info to data collectors. EVERY large organization and company sells your data. Don't even get me started on those "Loyalty Rewards" cards from the grocery store and Target. They are a goldmine to data brokers. Remember when you got to college and you started getting all those credit card applications? Yeah, the schools sold you out. On and on...

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