turbodata.com

A parking ticket is the most trivial document that can enter your life. A scrap of paper under the windshield wiper. Forty dollars. Most people pay and forget about it. Behind that scrap of paper stands a private company that knows more about you than your bank does. It knows your license plate number. It knows who the vehicle is registered to — it has a direct online interface to the DMV database and access to the national NLETS network, which returns vehicle owner records from all fifty states. It knows your home address. And if you didn't pay on time — it purchases your Social Security number from a third-party data broker so it can intercept your state income tax refund through the Franchise Tax Board. Or your lottery winnings. At the same time, your debt gets reported to a credit bureau, and your car gets flagged for a registration hold. That company is Turbo Data Systems, Inc. Over more than forty years, it has become the invisible operator of the ticketing machine for more than 130 cities, police departments, universities, and hospitals across California. Through it flows the issuance of citations, the collection of payments, the placement of vehicles on registration holds, and the referral of debtors to the state tax authority, collection agencies, and credit bureaus. All of that work has accumulated in one digital archive: names, addresses, license plates, VINs, Social Security numbers of motorists, banking details for 130 municipal accounts, tax forms and medical records belonging to the company's own employees, and confidential pricing documents from competitors. We have over a quarter of a terabyte of data — more than 230 gigabytes. This article contains only a portion of the data we have chosen to disclose. Everything else will be available to download and review independently once the full archive is released.