Finding Other Festiva/Aspire Owners by Vin

[1990new]

If you are lucky your local county tax offices may have made it easy for you to find other Festiva's registered in your area:
Check this link out and you will see what I mean.

http://www.orangeburgcounty.org/AutoTaxes/Auto_taxes_main.asp

Search on vin but only put the first 5 letters KNJPT.

My county's web search site (Charleston) does not allow search by VIN.
Some do, some don't.

[htchbck]

Dude, that is the coolest! A bit stalkerish lol but very cool nonetheless!

[skimsucka]

that's soooo awesome and either your county is awesome or its the Vin but there isn't any 88 or 89 cars in the list!!

[1990new]

Dude, that is the coolest! A bit stalkerish lol but very cool nonetheless!

Stalkerish?? You pay your taxes and thus the money needed to pay for all the equipment, technology, and salaries of the people who do the work to collect the taxes. This is public information and you have the right to access (most) of it.

Lots of businesses mine this information for marketing and lots of taxing entities also sell the formatted information to businesses for marketing purposes. Insurance companies are one of the biggest users of this information.

Most information that is in the public domain belongs to you, the taxpayer and more and more taxing entities are making it easily searchable via the internet. Different law in different state set limits on what the public has access to via the internet. It's usually the State DMV which collects the VIN numbers and supplies them to the counties to allow them to maintain records to collect vehicle taxes, and they sometimes put limits on public access to that information.

[Safety Guy]

Cool! I'll have to check my county.

No go. Which is probably good, in light of a past event in which some scrotes were finding (or guessing) SS numbers and "reverse inputting" them into the Clerk of Courts (?) website. They had done a number of rip offs when they got caught. That's when the county shut down its site for changes to prevent abuse like that. I bet the auto stuff was changed at the same time to prevent "lookups" with just the VIN numbers. I ran my own exact vin and only got the car info, not my address or name info. All that was blank, but the spaces were there, which leads me to believe at one time it worked.

Karl

[htchbck]

Stalkerish?? You pay your taxes and thus the money needed to pay for all the equipment, technology, and salaries of the people who do the work to collect the taxes. This is public information and you have the right to access (most) of it.

Lots of businesses mine this information for marketing and lots of taxing entities also sell the formatted information to businesses for marketing purposes. Insurance companies are one of the biggest users of this information.

Most information that is in the public domain belongs to you, the taxpayer and more and more taxing entities are making it easily searchable via the internet. Different law in different state set limits on what the public has access to via the internet. It's usually the State DMV which collects the VIN numbers and supplies them to the counties to allow them to maintain records to collect vehicle taxes, and they sometimes put limits on public access to that information.

Sorry man, I sometimes forget that tone of voice can't be heard online. I was totally joking about the "stalker" thing. I know thats not what you were intending by it. Our county doesn't have that online, but when we were looking at houses we used the public property tax records ALL the time They are very useful.

[Eaglefreek]

Sorry but I don't think that is cool at all. Total invasion of privacy and can put someone at risk. Too many freaks out there.

[kartracer46]

Nah, just freaks like me that will hunt you down and try to buy your car.

[1990new]

that's soooo awesome and either your county is awesome or its the Vin but there isn't any 88 or 89 cars in the list!!

Try the search again using just the first 3, "KNJ". the vin numbers changed in 1990.

BTW. Orangeburg County is not my county (mine is Charleston). You cannot search by Vin number in my county. However you can search the vehicle records by name/address. (www.charlestoncounty.org).

Every county in SC has their own way of doing things. They have to follow federal, state, and local (county council) laws but as long as do that, they can do it their way. Also within each county there are elected officials (ex Sheriff, Treasurer, Auditor, Clerk Of Court, Register of Deeds etc.) who do things there own way. Most state and local governments in the US and other countries are like this. All of these different entities have to pass information about taxpayers (and criminals if it be the case) around in and among themselves to do their job.

[1990new]

Dude, that is the coolest! A bit stalkerish lol but very cool nonetheless!

Sorry, I did see you lol and knew you were joking...should have added an icon :p myself.

[1990new]

Sorry but I don't think that is cool at all. Total invasion of privacy and can put someone at risk. Too many freaks out there.

Your are correct of course. Trouble is, since we all became an IP address, we apparently do not have any privacy rights any longer. 1984 has become reality.

[1990new]

Cool! I'll have to check my county.

No go. Which is probably good, in light of a past event in which some scrotes were finding (or guessing) SS numbers and "reverse inputting" them into the Clerk of Courts (?) website. They had done a number of rip offs when they got caught. That's when the county shut down its site for changes to prevent abuse like that. I bet the auto stuff was changed at the same time to prevent "lookups" with just the VIN numbers. I ran my own exact vin and only got the car info, not my address or name info. All that was blank, but the spaces were there, which leads me to believe at one time it worked.

Karl

Security is always an issue where public records are concerned.
The use of SS numbers to uniquely identify people in public documents used to be much more widespread than it is today. And people used to be less cautious about putting their SS numbers on documents that they fill out. One of the first types of documents that counties first began to display on the internet was property deeds. This was to make it easier to do property record searches. Problem was these original documents go back lots of years before computers and were free form text. They had to be scanned in and there were SS numbers all over the place. (Lots of deed information got into display systems before this issue was identified).
Lots of tax money has been spent to correct this particular problem of identifying and obscuring SS numbers in these documents.
Now when you are searching deeds, you will see SS numbers blacked out in the original images of those document. Sometimes being a little behind in implementing new technology is a good thing.

So you could find you vehicle by entering the entire vin number but the address did not display. Technically, here in SC that is supposed to be the case also. I was a little surprised that the partial vin lookup worked in Orangeburg County and showed the address. Another examples is
http://www.berkeleycountysc.gov/main/eserv.asp?linkID=f When you look up vehicle info there, It does not show the address or the vin (none show the Tag number).
In your case the address may or may not have been there before. Lots of the time the web page designs that the public sees and the one seen by departments within the county are the same. It may be that those search field are opened based on program security dependent on the where the search was originated.

With such varied laws between the 50 states and countless counties, you can imagine what a bonanza this is to the local government software business.