The link was preceded by the words "from any of several dozen commercial providers that resell government data:" so that's how I took it. It would be at a .gov domain if it were state affiliated.

It said from the DMV. No evidence of that here.

Also, "reselling government data" implies that the government explicitly gave permission to a business selling your data. I doubt that's true. More likely, these entities gathered data from whatever entities they could, probably various private companies from which you've made online purchases.

That, and, I've never consented to release my birthday publicly. I consider it to be private, therefore it is private. It's mine! I expect the government would not release it since they use it as part of an identifier all the time.

There's no perfect identifier. That's why we need security. This is a major lapse.

Pretty sneaky of the comment above yours to try to pass dmv.org as a government website.

I think you are confused about what "private" means.

I've never "consented" to "releasing" my address publicly, but real estate records are public information thus the real estate I own is easily queried from my town's website and the real estate transaction was published in all the local newspapers. You can even look up my property tax bills from the towns website and my payment history of said taxes. If you're feeling generous you can also pay my property taxes online too.

You're trying to redefine private.

Is the list of doctors you visit private? I could probably discover such information, but it is considered private.

Your address is usually public unless you go to lengths to obfuscate it. You can go to Hollywood and get a map of where all the movie stars live. And, the white pages list your phone number unless you opt out.

Birthday has never been publicly available until this voter data leak. Not good.

>Is the list of doctors you visit private?

Yes, this is explicitly protected by law.

>I could probably discover such information

No you can't get this information, and certainly not legally.

>Your address is usually public

Exactly but I never "gave my consent to release my address," it just is.

>Birthday has never been publicly available until this voter data leak.

Open up a newspaper or open up yourlocalpaper.com There's a whole birth announcements section!

How do you think the RNC got this information in the first place? Public records. The RNC is NOT the government.

> How do you think the RNC got this information in the first place?

I imagine they used campaign dollars to buy the information from private companies with whom you've done business. Maybe legally, maybe not.

The RNC certainly isn't offering up such information as to where they sourced the data they leaked.

> I've never consented to release my birthday publicly.

Too bad. The government doesn't care about you consenting to things. In fact, making you do things without your consent is literally the entire point of organized government, even if we usually overlook that because it's for a good purpose (for example, taxation to pay for health care or national defense).

You're off topic. The government hasn't released my birthday. I question their data security practices, but any release of such information would be considered a mistake.

I don't care if you think paying for health care or national security is important or not. That's an unrelated issue to whether or not Birthday is private or public data.

How do you know if your birthday isn't in some publicly accessible government database somewhere? Did you try to find it? Did you hire a private investigator (who has quick access to all those databases) and ask them if they can find your birthday?

If it were, I would let the government know that's not okay. Hackers would be one step closer to being able to sign up for a credit card under my name.

If it's true that that information is out in the wild now, then I expect government to tighten their tech security procedures.

"I would let the government know that's not okay" - lol, yeah good luck with that.

How do you think the RNC got birthdays for 200 million Americans in the first place? Public records. 200 million Americans are NOT affiliated with the RNC.

> How do you think the RNC got birthdays for 200 million Americans in the first place?

As I replied elsewhere, there is a market for reselling your information on the internet. In some cases that is legal, and in many it's probably not. As a tech person you should know this.