Camden: Like it or not, date of birth is public

The foundation filed a public records request several years ago for the names, work email addresses and dates of birth of all state employees who are eligible to be in the unions; that would enable the foundation to send them information about why they might want to get out of those unions. The unions objected, saying dates of birth are personal information that’s exempt from the law.

A trial court said the dates of birth were public records and should be released; an appeals court said they weren’t and shouldn’t.

The dispute went to the state Supreme Court, where the Allied Daily Newspapers — to which The Spokesman-Review belongs — weighed in on the side of releasing the dates of birth, saying they have long been a public record. The American Civil Liberties Union weighed in on the side of not releasing them, saying it violated the employees’ constitutional right of privacy.

Writing for the five-member majority, Justice Debra Stephens offered a strict construction opinion for releasing the records. There’s no exemption in state law that would cover the government employees’ dates of birth, she said. The Legislature grants exemptions, and it could have included that information when it exempted the dates of birth for dependents of public employees, which are sometimes kept for various benefit programs.

But it didn’t. The Legislature even had a bill to exempt those very records in 2018, and it passed the Senate but not the House, although that’s not mentioned in the opinion.

The Public Records Law is supposed to be construed liberally in the absence of an exemption, and any exemptions that exist are to be construed narrowly, she said.

Besides, dates of birth are available through many public records, Stephens noted.

The dissenting judges suggested that their learned brethren aren’t living in the second decade of the 21st century, where people have to worry about “the intrusion of technology into our personal privacy,” Justice Charles Wiggins wrote. A date of birth tied to a name is one record that identity thieves seek, he said.

“Criminals need not hack the government’s servers to get personal information when all they need do is submit a (public records) request,” Justice Steven Gonzalez wrote. “Their victims will be none the wiser.”

This year, the Legislature included dates of birth in the list of personal information that would require a business to notify someone in the event of a “breach of system security.”

As Stephens noted, your date of birth may be readily available on other public records, so this is a legal battle and possibly a legislative battle likely to continue and involve more than just state employees.

Obviously, they’re on birth certificates, although getting those can be pricey and complicated for other people to access. They’re also on marriage licenses, driver’s licenses, some traffic and misdemeanor citations, various court records and voter registrations.

The Senate tried to exempt date-of-birth information in voter lists from the Public Records Act when it passed automatic voter registration in 2018, but the House didn’t agree.

That was good for reporters who sometimes use those records to find people or keep track of others who move across the state after being fired for violating some rule or code of conduct in one location and try to land a similar job in a new spot.