Before there was any electronic access to personal information databases for finding people, private investigators trudged down to our local or state government offices to look up all public records. Once I located someone through a county dog license application. But, how often do dog owners move, or get their dogs licensed, for that matter? Anyway, the death of the “public” in public records seems to have found sufficient acceptance that the governor of New York is proposing that state issued hunting licenses be removed from public access.

In a passing reference in this article, apparently a state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Department of Environmental Conservation against the NY Assembly, which had been using the personal information from sports licenses to mail to those constituents. I guess that Pataki wants to set this in stone before an appeal gets going and he looses the popular advantage of the label “privacy legislation”. The hunting and fishing license application lists fields for date of birth and driver license, along with the usual name and address.