Data Brokers, Data Providers, Public Records, and Regulation: Finding the Right Balance

Executive Summary

Who We Are

The Coalition for Sensible Public Records Access (CSPRA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the principle of open public records access. We represent data providers who follow the laws, enable useful transactions and societally beneficial activities, and who are responsible data stewards and corporate citizens. Data providers are part of the larger information industry on which a great deal of American prosperity, opportunity, and influence depends.

How Do Data Providers Provide Benefits to People?

A data provider gathers, curates, protects, and provides the data elements necessary to, and lawfully used for, completing transactions, preventing fraud and harm, setting fair rates, meeting a legal requirement, enforcing the law or a contract, enabling communications with current and prospective customers, and making a variety of decisions. The data they use to create these value-added services come from public records and private sources. Data provider services include activities that are customer-initiated, used in support of a customer service function, or used to protect customers or the provider of a service from fraud, contract violations, misuse of resources, illegal activities, and other various harms. Many of these services are part of licensed and/or regulated industries or government activities like insurance, credit, law enforcement, banking, employment, housing, transportation, consumer product safety recalls, federally required automotive recalls, civil legal processes, investing, child support recovery, and supply management to name a few.