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The FCRA’s permissible-purpose list is closed. 15 U.S.C. 1681b(a) says a consumer reporting agency may furnish a consumer report under the circumstances it enumerates “and no other” – credit, employment, insurance underwriting, a court order, the consumer’s own written instructions, and a short list besides. That closed list is why the distinction we draw matters rather than being a formality. We are a public-records research firm and not a consumer reporting agency, what we produce is not a consumer report, and it therefore must not be used to decide a hiring, tenancy, credit or insurance question. Guides in this library that touch those uses route you to an FCRA-compliant provider instead of pretending the line is blurry.

Motor vehicle records are prohibited by default. The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. 2721(a), provides that a state department of motor vehicles and its officers, employees and contractors “shall not knowingly disclose or otherwise make available to any person or entity” personal information from a motor vehicle record, except as subsection (b) permits. The default is refusal and the exceptions are enumerated. So every license-plate and vehicle-owner guide here describes work done under one of those enumerated uses, with the purpose recorded, rather than treating DMV data as something anyone can buy.

GLBA restricts the disclosing institution, and separately bans pretexting. Two sections are routinely conflated. 15 U.S.C. 6802(a) constrains the bank: a financial institution may not disclose nonpublic personal information to a nonaffiliated third party without first giving the consumer a compliant notice. That is an obligation on the holder of the data, not a license for anyone else to obtain it. The rule pointed at researchers is 15 U.S.C. 6821(a), which makes it a violation to obtain or attempt to obtain customer information of a financial institution about another person by a false, fictitious or fraudulent statement to the institution or to its customer.

Those three sections also explain a decline. Someone who has gone out of contact has often done so on purpose, and a request that reads like an attempt to reach a person who does not want to be reached gets more scrutiny at intake, not less – we ask what the lawful purpose is, and we decline where there is not one, including any request that looks like stalking, harassment or an attempt to expose someone in a domestic-violence or safety situation. State law adds its own layer on top of all three sections, so treat everything on this page as general information rather than legal advice for your jurisdiction, and see the compliance guides above for the detail.