Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-13-03671/USCOURTS-ca7-13-03671-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Jason Senne
Appellant
Village of Palatine, Illinois
Appellee

Document Text:

In the 

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ 

No. 13-3671 

JASON SENNE, on behalf of himself and all others similarly 

 situated, 

Plaintiff-Appellant, 

v.

VILLAGE OF PALATINE, ILLINOIS, 

Defendant-Appellee. 

____________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the 

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. 

No. 10 C 5434 — Matthew F. Kennelly, Judge. 

____________________ 

ARGUED APRIL 6, 2015 — DECIDED APRIL 28, 2015 

____________________ 

Before POSNER and SYKES, Circuit Judges, and SIMON, Chief 

District Court Judge.*

POSNER, Circuit Judge. One evening in 2010 Jason Senne 

parked his car on the street in front of his house in the Village of Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. A Village ordinance forbids parking on the street between 1 a.m. and 6 

* Hon. Philip P. Simon of the Northern District of Indiana.

Case: 13-3671 Document: 34 Filed: 04/28/2015 Pages: 8
2 No. 13-3671 

a.m. for more than 15 minutes. At 1:35 a.m. a police officer 

wrote a $20 parking ticket and stuck it face down under the 

windshield wiper on the driver’s side of the car. The officer 

filled in the ticket with Senne’s name, date of birth, sex, 

height, weight, driver’s license number, and address (which 

turned out to be outdated), plus information about the vehicle (its color, make, model, license plate, and vehicle identification number). We do not understand Senne to be denying 

that his car had been parked on the street for more than 15 

minutes before it was ticketed. 

A week later Senne filed this suit, which he sought to be 

certified as a class action, against the Village. The suit asks 

for statutory damages for the Village’s having, he alleges, 

violated the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. 

§§ 2721 et seq. The Act forbids “a State department of motor 

vehicles, and any officer, employee, or contractor thereof, ... 

[to] knowingly disclose or otherwise make available to any 

person or entity ... personal information ... about any individual obtained by the department in connection with a motor vehicle record, except as provided in subsection (b).” 

§ 2721(a)(1). It further provides that “an authorized recipient 

of personal information” from the department, such as the 

municipal police department that ticketed Senne, “may resell or redisclose personal information only for a use permitted under subsection (b).” § 2721(c). Subsection (b), to which 

both subsections that we’ve just cited refer, permits “disclosure” of personal information for fourteen permissible uses, 

including “use in connection with any civil, criminal, administrative, or arbitral proceeding in any Federal, State, or local 

court or agency or before any self-regulatory body, including the service of process, investigation in anticipation of litigation, and the execution or enforcement of judgments and 

Case: 13-3671 Document: 34 Filed: 04/28/2015 Pages: 8
No. 13-3671 3 

orders, or pursuant to an order of a Federal, State, or local 

court,” § 2721(b)(4), as well as for “use by any government 

agency, including any court or law enforcement agency, in 

carrying out its functions, or any private person or entity acting on behalf of a Federal, State, or local agency in carrying 

out its functions.” § 2721(b)(1). To complete the picture the 

Act defines “personal information” as “information that 

identifies an individual, including an individual’s photograph, social security number, driver identification number, 

name, address (but not the 5-digit zip code), telephone number, and medical or disability information.” § 2725(3). 

Two years later, after a panel of this court had affirmed 

the dismissal of the suit by the district court on the ground 

that the disclosure of Senne’s personal information on the 

parking ticket was a permissible use, the court granted rehearing en banc. The en banc court agreed with the panel 

that placing the parking ticket on the windshield of Senne’s 

car had been a “disclosure” within the meaning of the Act, 

695 F.3d 597 (7th Cir. 2012), but remanded for a determination by the district court of “whether all of the disclosed information actually was used in effectuating” one of the permissible purposes that we quoted above, 695 F.3d at 608 

(emphasis in the original)—namely, either a use by the Palatine police in performing its duties or a use in connection 

with the service of process to initiate the administrative proceeding relating to the parking fine. A proceeding to determine whether to impose a parking fine is an administrative 

proceeding, and placing the parking ticket on the windshield 

of the alleged violator’s vehicle is the usual method of serving process for parking violations. 

Case: 13-3671 Document: 34 Filed: 04/28/2015 Pages: 8
4 No. 13-3671 

On remand, following discovery and the filing of cross 

motions for summary judgment, the district court granted 

summary judgment in favor of the Village on the ground 

that the information disclosed on the parking tickets had furthered both of these purposes. Senne has again appealed. 

Palatine’s chief of police was deposed in the district court 

and testified to a number of permissible uses of the personal 

information that police officers place on parking tickets. One 

is that such information on a parking ticket increases the 

likelihood that the ticket will be paid, because the driver or 

owner knows that the police know his identity and address 

and will therefore have no difficulty locating him. Another is 

that a person who receives a parking ticket on a car that he 

rented or borrowed, rather than owns, learns from the personal information on the ticket who is deemed responsible 

for paying the ticket—the owner. Knowing this, the borrower or renter will realize that, as the party responsible for the 

ticketing of the vehicle, he should pay the ticket rather than 

leave that to the innocent owner. 

And there is more. A person who thinks the ticket was issued in error, for example because he is not from Palatine 

(the police department’s policy is not to issue parking tickets 

to out of town visitors), will sometimes take the ticket to a 

police station and ask the watch commander to void it. The 

commander can, just by looking at the ticket, determine 

whether the address on it is a Palatine address and whether 

the person matches the description of the person named on 

the ticket, as opposed to being for example that person’s 

teenage son trying to get the ticket voided before his parent 

finds out that he got a ticket. More generally, it appears that 

often a person bringing the ticket to the police station will 

Case: 13-3671 Document: 34 Filed: 04/28/2015 Pages: 8
No. 13-3671 5 

tell the watch commander that although the name on the 

ticket is not his name, it was his car that was ticketed and he 

doesn’t want an innocent person to have to pay the ticket. 

Impressed by the volunteered confession, the watch commander invariably voids the ticket. 

Furthermore, the police chief testified that a person 

whose English is poor often will, upon being stopped by a 

police officer for a traffic violation, identify himself by showing the officer a Palatine parking ticket that he’s kept in his 

glove compartment; the ticket will have his name and address on it, and so identify him. And likewise a person who 

is stopped and discovers he’s forgotten his driver’s license 

but has a parking ticket in his glove compartment that has 

his name and address on it and he shows it to the officer. In 

both cases information on the ticket about the person’s 

height, weight, and age will enable the officer to determine 

whether the person named on the ticket is the driver.

The police chief further testified that the personal information on the ticket enables drivers to correct errors in the 

Village’s motor vehicle records. A former owner of a car 

may have failed to remove the license plates when he sold it, 

causing him to be charged with the new owner’s parking violations until the state is notified of the sale. Similarly, receiving a ticket with an outdated address will remind a driver who has moved that he has forgotten to update his motor 

vehicle record—as happened to Senne when he received the 

ticket that precipitated his lawsuit. He doesn’t deny that disclosing such information on a parking ticket serves this error-correction function or that accurate motor vehicle records assist the police in law enforcement. 

Case: 13-3671 Document: 34 Filed: 04/28/2015 Pages: 8
6 No. 13-3671 

In fact Senne presented no evidence to contest the police 

chief’s testimony, and so he failed to create an issue for trial. 

His position is not that personal information on a parking 

ticket has no utility to the police but that the police made no 

use of the personal information on his parking ticket. In so 

arguing he is trying to exploit an ambiguity in the Driver’s 

Privacy Protection Act. While authorizing disclosure of personal information “for use in connection with any ... administrative ... proceeding,” the Act doesn’t define “use.” But 

the “for” in front of “use” is a compelling clue to its meaning. Suppose you buy an umbrella. And someone not too intelligent asks you: “why did you buy an umbrella?” And you 

answer “for use when it rains.” Now it may be that you live 

in a dry climate, where it rarely rains. Maybe eventually you 

discard the umbrella, never having used it. And yet you had 

bought it “for use” in shielding you from rain rather than to 

just sit in your umbrella stand. And similarly the personal 

information collected by the Palatine police department that 

we discussed was “for use” in connection with the department’s duties, whether or not each item of information, such 

as Senne’s address, would ever be used. 

This is the uniform understanding of the cases that have 

discussed the issue—including a case in this circuit left undisturbed by our en banc decision in the present litigation. 

Graczyk v. West Publishing Co., 660 F.3d 275, 279 (7th Cir. 

2011), held that West Publishing Company could “obtain 

and store DMV [Department of Motor Vehicle] records [containing personal information] in bulk in order to later sell 

them to someone with a permissible use”; the uses were not 

required to be immediate or certain. To the same effect see 

Taylor v. Acxiom Corp., 612 F.3d 325, 337 (5th Cir. 2010), noting by way of illustration that “a lawyer will never read all 

Case: 13-3671 Document: 34 Filed: 04/28/2015 Pages: 8
No. 13-3671 7 

the opinions in all 1,000 volumes of Federal Second (and 

may likely never read anything in at least a few of the volumes). But he or she still buys the reporter set for the purpose of legal research.” The broader point is that a library 

buys books to be used by being read, but some library books 

are never read. See also Cook v. ACS State & Local Solutions, 

Inc., 663 F.3d 989, 995 (8th Cir. 2011); Howard v. Criminal Information Services, Inc., 654 F.3d 887, 892 (9th Cir. 2011); and 

Welch v. Jones, 770 F. Supp. 2d 1253, 1259 (N.D. Fla. 2011)—

the source of our umbrella analogy. 

Granted, we need to balance the utility (present or prospective) of the personal information on a parking ticket 

against the potential harm. It’s true that the Act does not 

state that a permissible use can be offset by the danger that 

the use will result in a crime or tort. But statutes have to be 

interpreted to avoid absurd results. There is an argument for 

placing identifying information such as height and weight 

on a ticket placed face down under a windshield wiper, but 

it would be at once unnecessary and an offensive invasion of 

privacy to place that information in a newspaper, on a billboard, or on the police department’s website. The balance 

between law enforcement and privacy favors allowing discreet disclosure of limited information of credible value to 

law enforcement, since the potential harm of such disclosure 

is negligible but the benefits nonnegligible. 

It’s true that a television actress was murdered in 1989 by 

a stalker whose private investigator had lawfully obtained 

her unlisted address from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The murder was a catalyst of the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. Taylor v. Acxiom Corp., supra, 612 F.3d at 

336 and n. 9; Pichler v. UNITE, 542 F.3d 380, 400 (3d Cir. 

Case: 13-3671 Document: 34 Filed: 04/28/2015 Pages: 8
8 No. 13-3671 

2008) (dissenting opinion). But personal information on a 

parking ticket placed face down under the windshield wiper 

on the driver’s side does not facilitate stalking. A stalker 

who had chanced on his intended victim’s vehicle would follow her home rather than relying on her to park illegally and 

on the police to write a parking ticket rich in personal information. The concern that triggered the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act was with stalkers who went to motor vehicle bureaus to obtain the home addresses of their intended victims, 

more than thirty states having made such information available to members of the public for a small fee, as a means of 

enhancing state revenues. That would be a clear example of 

where the balance between law enforcement and privacy favored privacy. Senne presents no evidence that anyone has 

ever taken a parking ticket face down under the driver’s 

windshield wiper in Palatine and turned it over and read 

and used any of the personal information on the ticket. Nor 

does he contest the Village’s evidence that there has never

been a stalking or any other crime (such as identity theft), or 

tort (such as invasion of privacy), resulting from personal 

information placed on traffic tickets issued by Palatine police. Had the Village been making the information on parking tickets publicly available over the Internet, or had it 

placed on the tickets highly sensitive information such as the 

owner’s social security number, the risk of a nontrivial invasion of personal privacy from the disclosure would be much 

greater and probably outweigh the benefits to law enforcement. The Village has never done that.

AFFIRMED. 

Case: 13-3671 Document: 34 Filed: 04/28/2015 Pages: 8