Government selling your details

JAMES GARDINER finds that the legal sale of information on vehicle owners and drivers is a nice little earner.

The Government is making $2.5 million a year selling personal information about motor vehicle owners and driver's licences to anyone prepared to pay.

Car dealers, financiers, insurance companies and other businesses buy large chunks of the database and hold copies in their own files, which can be used for direct marketing.

They can request 1000 vehicle files at a time, something the Privacy Commissioner has wanted stopped for several years.

The Government receives more than $2.4 million from selling information from the Motor Vehicle Register, but far less - $66,000 - from the more tightly controlled Drivers Licence Register.

Ironically, the Land Transport Safety Authority has refused to identify individuals or companies that bulk-buy from the Motor Vehicle Register - on the grounds that that information is commercially confidential and to release it would breach the buyers' privacy.

The authority says no one has ever bought the entire database, but in the past year 3.5 million inquiries for information were processed.

The information available to anyone who can supply number plate details includes: names and addresses of present and previous owners, make, model, colour and year the vehicle was first registered.

Craig Dowling, of the LTSA, said concerns had been raised that providing vehicle owners' names and addresses breached the Privacy Act, but this was not so because the Transport (Vehicle and Driver Registration and Licensing) Act took legal precedence.

The law had "no restriction on who can access this information and no restriction on what they can do with the information once accessed," Mr Dowling said.

But Transport Minister Mark Gosche wants restrictions to protect people's privacy and told the Weekend Herald yesterday that he wanted the law changed before year's end.

Privacy Commissioner Bruce Slane dealt with a case last year where a woman was asked out on a date over the phone by a man who identified himself only as Graham. He had seen her in her car and written down the registration number, then paid $2.50 to the LTSA to find her name and address.

When she went to the LTSA to find out who "Graham" was, she found the authority had no record of those who sought access to the register and would not have released that information to her anyway.

Fortunately for the woman concerned, Graham was simply a resourceful companion-seeker.

Senior police officers are concerned that criminals might use such information for more sinister purposes.

Detective Superintendent Bill Bishop, the police national crime manager, said he was concerned that information such as home addresses could enable people to be targeted and their privacy invaded.

Information available on the Drivers Licence Register is limited and there is less demand for it, according to the authority.

Apparently, only law enforcement authorities can be told anything more than whether the licence is current and what categories it includes - whether, say, the driver can operate a passenger vehicle or a truck.

But police can search both registers for any type of information - vehicle make, model, colour or by name or address. To get access to the driver's photograph, police must have the consent of the individual or a court order and then only in relation to the enforcement of transport legislation. Your signature is said to be safe under any circumstances.

Last year, 36,056 inquiries were processed, for which the authority received just over $66,000.

There are 2.5 million licensed drivers on the register, which contains their digital photograph, their full name, date of birth, address, whether they are an organ donor and the types of vehicles they are permitted to drive.