While New York state otherwise appears to show little concern about driver’s privacy, New York Attorney General Letitia James has now decided to sue National General and Allstate insurers over two data breaches.
Those incidents left some 165,000 New York residents’ driver’s license numbers exposed – but the overarching policy the state has been imposing these last years doesn’t give the impression that privacy is an actual priority.
We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
Not only are various surveillance techniques in place in the city itself, like drones and surveillance robots, but the state recently decided to sue the Trump administration in a bid to continue deploying congestion pricing (MTA) that relies on license plate scanning.
Yet the said two data breaches is the hill the local administration appears to have chosen to die on, at least in terms of supposed privacy concerns.
It’s a strange hill for a number of reasons, not least because New York continues to push digital ID, including mobile driver’s licenses – and when major security problems like data leaks, that opponents of these developments keep warning about – the “solution” seems to be to sue individual companies, rather than rethink the overall policy.
It’s all the more striking that the advancement of digital ID has been promoted most intensely over the past couple of years – even if the security incidents the two insurance companies are sued over happened in 2020 and 2021.
The lawsuits filed this week pin the blame on National General and Allstate as providing inadequate security protections – while acting within what is supposedly a sound system.
Just last month, media outlets with ties to the previous administration highlighted New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s attempt to stave off the Trump White House move to end the attempt to introduce a congestion pricing toll.
In the summer of 2024, Hochul (now hailed as the fearless one behind a lawsuit to overturn Trump’s decision to shut down MTA) happened to also be the one who paused the implementation of the controversial plan, as a failed campaign tactic (namely, “so New York House Democrats could win in November’s elections” – as one report put it).
The MTA project has to date cost $507 million, awarded to TransCore, that was to design, build and operate the tolling cameras.
