Sunshine Week: Find out who's been watching you

Everybody wants a piece of us. Some background here, some facts there, some images squirreled away on a server for safekeeping.

In today's big-data world, government agencies and private companies compile information about each of us, giving rise to concern about what, exactly, they're doing with it. It is virtually impossible to stop data collectors from collecting; in many cases, we have no choice but to turn over bits of our personal lives in return for access to the staples of modern American life.

Like, say, owning and driving a car.

To get a license to drive a car or to obtain a sanctioned photo identification card, New Yorkers must surrender the basics about ourselves to the state government. When we buy and register a car or truck, we surrender more information. When we drive it down the street, we may surrender even more.

All of that information is kept by state agencies. They use it to enforce vehicle and traffic laws and to hunt for criminals and scofflaws, among other things. But much of the information is offered for sale to all sorts of private-sector companies. They make many other uses of it.

By and large, individual New Yorkers have no say-so over who gets to see their personal motor-vehicle data or how it's used.

But we can at least find out who's using it. Here's how.

Who's looking you up?

The state demands your name, birth date, eye color, address and a head shot in return for a driver's license or photo ID. It keeps track of traffic violations, drunken-driving arrests and accidents in which licensed drivers are involved. If you register a vehicle, the state keeps a record of that as well.

The state Department of Motor Vehicles makes this information available online to police, many of whom can access it directly from their patrol cars. It also goes to other state and local government agencies and many private parties. We've reported on the availability and safeguarding of this data in a story published Tuesday, and also dug into the topic previously.

Police don't pay to access it, but New York makes several million dollars a year selling information to others.

You have the right to find out who has been searching for information about you in the DMV databases.

What you find could surprise you. In Minnesota, some citizens were stunned to learn several years ago that they'd been looked up dozens or hundreds of times in that state's motor-vehicle records. Women, particularly female television news figures and others in the public eye, were the most frequent victims.

New York says safeguards on its data should prevent that sort of thing here.

I found about two dozen occasions when my name or plate number were searched in the DMV databases by police officers or others. But I'm a dull, middle-aged male reporter.

I wonder what some of our local TV reporters or anchors would find.

To find out who has been looking you up, you can file a request with the agency under the state Freedom of Information law. I filed one in November for records of all searches for my name or plate number.

The response I received in December raised unanswered questions and less detail than I would have liked, but it nonetheless was interesting.

View the data I received here.

Police officers ran my plate, my name or my driver ID numbers 14 times in nine years. The response does not provide detail about the agency or location of the queries, but I can recall being pulled over by a police officer only once in that time period.

The other 13 times? Some likely were cases when an officer pulled up behind me at a red light or on the highway and wondered who I was.

Of note, someone ran my plate and then my driver ID number on June 26, 2007, when I covered a contentious public meeting in Victor about a much-publicized environmental contamination issue. Could an officer have been checking cars in the parking lot to see who was the meeting? I'll never know.

My name or plate were looked up four times by DMV employees and once by an employee in a Monroe County motor-vehicle office; I assume these were related to license renewals or car registrations.

There also was an inquiry by an insurance company and one by someone using a private data-aggregation service. Two more were made by me as I looked myself up to show co-workers how to use our dial-up access to the DMV database. (The state, citing a fear of lawsuits, ended all media access in 2010.)

There was an inquiry by someone in the state Attorney General's Office that may or may not have been directed at me, and three by officials who I'm pretty sure were looking for a different Steve Orr.

And I was informed that two parties, including the newspaper's human resources department, had registered me with a DMV service that automatically sends out notices when my driver's license status has changed.

To file your own FOIL request, you may craft your own, use our sample request or fill out the form on this DMV web page. The request may be emailed to FOIL@dmv.state.ny.us or sent via the postal service to NYS DMV, FOIL Office, 6 Empire State Plaza Room 222, Albany, NY 12228

Who's photographing your plates?

License-plate reader cameras mounted on cars or placed at fixed locations capture images of the plates on passing vehicles and turn them into a record of where and when that vehicle was spotted.

Law enforcement agencies in the Rochester area and elsewhere in New York are constantly capturing these images and using them to locate stolen cars or people for whom warrants have been issued. But as the

Democrat and Chronicle has reported agencies have accumulated tens of millions of these records and plan on keeping them for years, a practice that's strongly criticized by civil libertarians.

Private companies, including at least one in Rochester, also collect license-plate records and make them available for sale to private buyers.

We have no way to know if our vehicles have been photographed by a private company or who might have purchased those images in the data marketplace.

But we can find out when and where we've been tracked by law enforcement in Monroe County.

That privilege — no, make that a right — comes due to a lawsuit filed by the Democrat and Chronicle over the county refusal to honor a FOIL request we filed last summer for license-plate camera records made of my vehicle and several others.

In a January ruling on our lawsuit, state Supreme Court Justice John Ark said citizens have the right to see records collected about their own vehicle. (He also held that the public does not have a right under the FOIL law to see records of government-owned vehicles.)

View the records I received here:

Ark directed the parties to draft a procedure that people could follow to obtain license-plate camera records of their vehicles. That effort is on hold, however, while the Democrat and Chronicle considers whether to appeal the portion of his ruling that involved government vehicles.

In the interim, I see no reason why you can't file your own FOIL request with Monroe County as I did. You can use the county's online request form, or use our sample request.

As reflected in that sample request, you may ask for records only of a vehicle of which you're the registered owner. To be safe, you should provide documentation to verifies your ownership of the car or truck in question.

About Sunshine Week

This week is Sunshine Week, a national campaign celebrated each March to highlight governments' open records laws. News organizations across the country started the effort — now in its 10th year — to push for better Freedom of Information laws and expanded enforcement. It was launched by the American Society of News Editors in March 2005.