Miscellaneous

This week in public records: California - Florida - Ohio

By PI Magazine (Tamara Thompson and Rosemarie Mesis)

It looks like the California Assembly bill that would have created an Internet Domestic Violence Registry has excised that feature from the recent draft.

The California Sheriffs’ Association has announced that VINELink will soon include all California counties, not just the 17 that are currently at that site. VINELink provides real-time status of offenders in county jails.

Private investigators will have more difficulty finding people in California if proposed legislation, Senate Bill 1423, becomes law. The bill titled, “Unlisted telephone numbers”, would ban phone companies from charging a fee to their subscribers who wish to have their phone numbers unlisted or nonpublished. In that case, won’t everyone in California request that their telephone number listing be private?

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a law firm that obtained Florida vehicle record information for litigation purposes. The plaintiff had claimed that the firm violated the federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act in purchasing his vehicle ownership data, but the court said that the law firm met one of the permitted exceptions. However, pending cases may lead to settlements in which ChoicePoint (and other public record providers) voluntarily agree to limit the personal information they release, even if the sale of the data complies with the law.

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled in favor of a newspaper which sought a list of names and addresses of foster care providers maintained by a state family services agency. In a complicated intersection of Ohio state public records access law and federal funding restrictions, the agency must determine which records meet the Social Security Act exception to disclosure.

Full post as published by PI buzz on May 13, 2008 (boomark / email).