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Comment by tomalpha | Hacker News Reader

> Tesla isn’t officially part of the study because it doesn’t allow J.D. Power access to customer vehicle registration data.

Interesting quote. Does that mean if I buy a non-Tesla car in the US, that my personal details automatically get passed on?

I'm not always a Tesla fan, and you could always claim this is because 'they have something to hide', but I very much like the sound of it from a privacy perspective.

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Per the WSJ article on the same topic:

"J.D. Power asks vehicle buyers about their experience during the first 90 days of owning a newly purchased car or truck. The Silicon Valley electric-car maker avoided past scrutiny by the 34-year-old survey because of a quirk in some state laws that require an auto maker’s permission to use new-vehicle registration data to contact customers. Tesla hasn’t provided that permission, according to J.D. Power."

It goes on to say that the data was collected from 35 states that do not require Tesla's permission.

There’s a company called RL Polk that Hoovers up basically everything you could imagine about car sales and resells that information for very high prices. Don’t know where they get their data but they have a row of data for each car sold.

I would guess vehicle registrations is where they are obtaining the data from.

My company Cross-Sell Reports does the same thing. We buy the registration data from each state. But it's a job to secure contracts from each states DMV. Sort of like securing licensing from nba or mlb teams.

Is the government allowed to sell that data?

Yeah they are.

There were quite a few articles. I believe maybe half of US states sell driver’s license data, including photos.

https://www.newsweek.com/dmv-drivers-license-data-database-i...

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