The People Search Sites in the Suspected Minnesota Killer's Notebook Are a Failure of Congress

On Monday, federal and state authorities charged Vance Boelter with the murders of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband. An affidavit written by an FBI Special Agent, published here by MSNBC, includes photos of a notepad found in Boelter’s SUV which included a long list of people search sites, some of which make it very easy for essentially anyone to find the address and other personal information of someone else in the U.S. The SUV contained other notebooks and some pages included the names of more than 45 Minnesota state and federal public officials, including Hortman, the affidavit says. Hortman’s home address was listed next to her name, it adds.

People search sites can present a risk to citizen’s privacy, and, depending on the context, physical safety. They aggregate data from property records, social media, marriage licenses, and other places and make it accessible to even those with no tech savvy. Some are free, some are paid, and some require a user to tick a box confirming they’re only using the data for certain permitted use cases. 

Congress has known about the risk of data for decades. In 1994 lawmakers created the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) after a stalker hired a private investigator who then obtained the address of actress Rebecca Schaeffer from a DMV. The stalker then murdered Schaeffer. With people search sites, though, lawmakers have been largely motionless, despite them existing for years, on the open web, accessible by a Google search and sometimes even promoted with Google advertisements.

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