The politics of privacy in America are imprudent and sentimental, fired by heart-tugging anecdotes that capture public imagination. Not too long ago TV actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by an obsessive fan that obtained her address through the department of motor vehicles. This later led Congress to pass the Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA), which forbids state licensing authorities from releasing the personal information of individuals without their consent. Unlike many European legislatures however, Congress has refused to pass a comprehensive privacy law that declares, as a general principle, that personal information gathered for one purpose should not be disclosed for another without the explicit consent of the individual concerned (Rosen 1). The history of the DPPA shows how debates over privacy tend to be distorted by overemotional sensationalism. The DPPA was promoted as an anti-stalking law after domestic violence advocates insisted that Schaeffer's de!
             ath was a symptom of a nationwide epidemic of stalking, assault, and murder of women by those who got their home addresses from departments of motor vehicles. In fact, celebrity stalking represents an irrelevant fraction of the invasions of privacy that result from the multimillion-dollar market in personal information sold by state agencies. After forcing individuals to reveal their social security numbers, addresses, and health information in an exchange for a driver's license, greedy states have earned millions by selling the same information to commercial databases. These databases, in turn, are one of the main sources for direct marketers, private investigators, and journalists who want to locate individuals against their will. In the one article I used, a private investigator stated that if he wanted, he could easily get the social security number and address from a database such as Autotrack. Armed with that number, he can get a pers...