When you register a car or apply for a dirver's license you give the Department of Motor Vehicles a lot of personal informaiton. What you may not know is that the DMV can and does sell some of that info.

So, who gets that information and how?

By law, the information you leave with the DMV isn't available to just anyone, but that wasn't always the case. In 1994 a Douglas County woman told her Assemblyman Lynn Hettrick, she was being stalked and the state was telling the stalker where she was. Hettrick introduced a bill to restrict access for legitimate business concerns.

"Some of those purposes include warranty recalls or issues like that," says Hettrick, now Deputy Chief of Staff to Governor Jim Gibbons. "Companies that do that sort of work have to have access to addresses and information like that to contact the owner of the vehicle."

Hettrick's bill passed nearly unanimously. The state continued to sell Nevadans names and addresses. At the time the DMV was making $4 to 5 million a year. Today it's double that amount.

The money is used to fund the records department itself and then the remainder is split between the general services and records division and our information technology division.

Department of Motor Vehicles spokesman Tom Jacobs says the department has never sold the lists for bulk mailing purposes and the law doesn't allow the information to be resold to others, but when a local resident received a solicitation from a company selling third-party extended vehicle warranties one month after registering their used car, they feared the state was selling to the wrong people.

The letter is from S-P-D, Service Protection Direct a company based in St. Louis, Missouri.;/

The letter notes the car was purchased a month ago (in this case not true) and warns that the factory warranty on the vehicle may have expired some months ago and failure to purchase a new warranty could leave the recipient facing expensive repairs at any time.

In general consumer advocates take a dim view of third party warranties and that's certainly true in this case. Service Protection Direct has an F rating with the Better Business Bureau and was sued by the Missouri Attorney General's office in 2008 for deceptive practices.

So, is the state selling information to a company with a questionable record? Jacobs says there's no record of any sale to SPD or its parent corporations, but he says he has a pretty good idea where it did come from.

"On the back of the letter it clearly says the source of the information was one of or all three credit reporting agencies."

The recipient is unconvinced, pointing out the letter was sent to her father at her address, not his. The only time those two pieces of
information were combined, she says, was when she reregistered the car one month ago.

In any case, Jacobs says, the same information and more is in the hands of car dealers, banks and loan companies who are only restricted by their own policies from making it available to others.

All the more reason when you get a solicitation to check out the company before signing.