Address List Isn’t Private, It’s Public

CREST HAVEN – Think your home address is private? Think again.
Should you place your name on a mailing list with the County of Cape May, notice new wording on the form’s bottom: “Names, addresses and email addresses provided to subscribe to information from the County of Cape May are subject to the Open Public Records Act and may be disclosed to third parties upon request.”
Don’t blame the county, the matter was decided Feb. 17 by a state Appellate Court. Cape May County was an “amicus curiae” (friend of the court) siding with Union County in a case that may touch many local residents, seniors or anyone else who has placed their name and address on a county mailing list.
In the case, the court ruled that the right of an individual to secure documents under the Open Public Records Act “trumped” the concept of the right of privacy of home addresses, said Arsenault.
That case emerged in 2011 when plaintiff, Tina Renna, who maintains a website titled “Union County Watchdog,” sought a mailing list from Union County of senior citizens’ addresses it had collected so that she might present to those who received mailings from the county her views on the material.
Acting under what it believed was its duty under the Open Public Records Act to protect addresses of those seniors; officials in Union County redacted the addresses of those who received its Senior Newsletter. Renna brought action that challenged that redaction stating that she was entitled to the addresses.
Cape May County has a similar quarterly newsletter sent to 200 senior citizens, who request it, among 3,500 who receive the document. For that reason, it joined the Union County case, said Assistant County Counsel James Arsenault before freeholders at their Tue., Feb. 28 meeting. He said of all other counties in the state, only Cape May sided with Union County in the court case.
“We maintain similar mailing lists to provide information, goods and services to many different communities,” said Arsenault.
It was his belief, he told the board that the decision was “contrary to that I believe is in the law” and added he hoped the state Supreme Court would “provide some protection of home addresses.”
“That is a sore spot with me,” said Freeholder Director Gerald Thornton.
As he had previously stated, Thornton finds it offensive that businesses or agencies that desire to “do personal data mining” can use the Open Public Records Act as a relatively inexpensive source of information.
He added that, after talking with officials in the Department of Aging, they, too, feared the court decision would “put a chill on people seeking services, and that is one thing we do not want to do,” stated Thornton.
The county’s senior citizens are “considered a vulnerable population,” he said. Allowing the county’s mailing lists to be made public, he added, endanger those who are often targets of criminals and scams.
“It is a population that should not be exposed to unfettered access,” he noted. He has no problem with citizens and the media seeking any public record, but draws the line at commercial entities, such as those seeking addresses,’
“When you consider the linkage of home addresses and other information, of dog licenses or burglar alarms,” said Thornton it creates “a list of places I don’t want to go” if a person has criminal intent, he added.
Regardless of seniors residing alone, Freeholder Kristine Gabor wondered if other mailing lists could provide lists of children that could easily fall into hands of predators.
There is no provision in the law, said Arsenault, from a party that secures a mailing list from a government agency from selling it to any other party.
Because of the seeming loophole in the law, since the court would allow disclosure of mailing lists from the county, Thornton said he believed legislation might be needed to protect home addresses by excluding them from release under the OPRA requirements.
The New Jersey Press Association joined the Renna in the Union County case, Arsenault said.
The court found the OPRA provides, “prior to allowing access to any government record, the custodian thereof shall redact from that record any information which discloses the social security number, credit card number, unlisted telephone, or driver license number of any person…” In such an instance, the court cited a Supreme Court recognition that, “when privacy interests are implicated, in order to balance the competing interest of OPRA, the public’s right to access and a public agency’s duty to safeguard from public access a person’s private information, the Doe factors should be applied.”
That Doe case involved a challenge to Megan’s Law regarding privacy of information including “the potential for harm in any subsequent nonconsensual disclosure.” It added that the custodian of those records “carries the burden of demonstrating that denial of access to the records is authorized by law.”
An earlier (Trial) court finding was that in “balancing the Doe factors, the lack of linkage between the home address and any other personal identifier weighed in favor of disclosure.”
Further, when “recipients signed up for the newsletter, they were not told their information would be subject to disclosure.” It noted that Renna “argues that those signing up for the newsletter self-selected themselves for additional communications. Union County maintained that “because the signup was voluntary, the list members had no expectation that their information would be subject to disclosure, as contrasted with people who by law are required to file their information with a government.”
The court said it assumed those who signed up for the newsletter did so for a “limited purpose, mainly senior citizen services, without considering whether the list would be divulged and whether they would receive additional information related to non-senior matters.”
“As a practical matter, we surmise that little thought was given to the list’s dissemination,” the court wrote. It stated a “balance of the Doe factors suggests that the interest in the dissemination of information, even that unrelated to senior matters, outweighs a perceived notion of expectation of privacy.”
When the court considered the “personal identifier” of the words “senior citizen,” it noted that the label to too vague. It added that anyone could place his or her name on the list, and that there was no “empirical data that the signatories were seniors they may well have included non-seniors in their number.”
In the county’s amicus brief is stated, “The GRC has specifically permitted records custodians to redact personally identifiable information, including names and addresses, from: season ticket records, Faulkner v. Rutgers University, GRC Complaint No. 2007-149 (May 28, 2008); records of fire and burglar alarm permits, Avin v. Borough of Oradell, GRC Complaint No. 2004-176 (March 10, 2005); and dog license applications, Bernstein v. Borough of Allendale, GRC Complaint No. 2004-195 (July 14, 2005). In each case, the GRC applied the Doe balancing test and considered, inter alia, the effect of unsolicited contact, intrusion or potential harm…”