Opinion ID: 2829245
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Disclosure of Birth Date Information

Text: The Comptroller argues that public employees’ dates of birth are “confidential” under section 552.101 of the PIA. It is useful to understand the PIA’s structure.
The stated policy of the PIA is to promote open government. “[I]t is the policy of this state that each person is entitled, unless otherwise expressly provided by law, at all times to complete information about the affairs of government and the official acts of public officials and employees.” Tex. Gov’t Code § 552.001(a). “Public information” includes information that is “collected, assembled, or maintained . . . in connection with the transaction of official business” by a governmental body. Id. § 552.002(a). In general, the PIA is to be liberally construed in favor of granting requests for information. Id. § 552.001(b). Relative to other freedom of information laws, such as FOIA, the Texas PIA more strongly favors transparency and open government. See , e.g. , City of Garland v. Dallas Morning News , 22 S.W.3d 351, 364 (Tex. 2000) (“Unlike the FOIA, our Act contains a strong statement of public policy favoring public access to governmental information and a statutory mandate to construe the Act to implement that policy and to construe it in favor of granting a request for information.”). While the PIA provides an ardent statutory edict for openness in state affairs, the Legislature has protected specified information from disclosure in Subchapter C of the PIA. Tex. Gov’t Code §§ 552.101–.151. A governmental agency is not required to disclose information excepted under Subchapter C of the PIA, but it may disclose such information if it chooses, “unless the disclosure is expressly prohibited by law or the information is confidential under law.” Id . § 552.007. Some examples of information that the PIA excepts from disclosure include information that would give advantage to a competitor or bidder, information in a student record at an educational institution funded wholly or partly by state revenue, and the social security number of a living person. Id . §§ 552.104, .114(a), .147(a). In addition to these exceptions, the Legislature created a special category of information in the PIA— “confidential” information. Information that is considered “confidential” is a subset of the information excepted from disclosure. See id . § 552.101. But, unlike information that is merely excepted from disclosure, the PIA prohibits the disclosure of confidential information and makes its disclosure a crime punishable by: “(1) a fine of not more than $1,000; (2) confinement in the county jail for not more than six months; or (3) both the fine and confinement.” Id. § 552.352. The Legislature specifically identifies in the PIA some information that is considered confidential. 8 Outside of the PIA, no fewer than 100 Texas statutes classify information as confidential for purposes of the PIA. 9 Other statutes specifically limit the scope of “confidential” information. For example, while section 552.147 generally excepts social security numbers of living persons from disclosure, it also explicitly states that it “does not make the social security number of a living person confidential under another provision of this chapter or other law.” Tex. Gov’t Code § 552.147. Other statutes, however, do make social security numbers contained in specified records “confidential” and subject to criminal penalties, such as on voter registration applications and in law enforcement personnel records. See Tex. Elec. Code § 13.004(c); Tex. Gov’t Code § 552.1175. The text of the PIA indicates that the Legislature intended the word “confidential” to have a specific meaning in the PIA, separating highly sensitive information that is prohibited from disclosure (such as the home address of a peace officer) from sensitive information that is merely excepted from disclosure (such as information in a student record). The PIA thus creates three distinct categories of public information—information required to be disclosed, information excepted from mandatory (but not voluntary) disclosure, and confidential information that is prohibited from disclosure and subject to criminal penalties. 1 0 It is within this statutory framework that I consider whether birth dates of public employees are considered to be part of this third category of “confidential information.” As a policy matter, it is admittedly undesirable to release information about public employees that could lead to identity theft. States typically have overwhelmingly addressed this issue by legislation. The Attorney General noted that a number of other states have excepted birth date information in personnel files from open records request disclosures in statutes. 1 1 The Texas Legislature has balanced the competing interests of open government and individual privacy in deciding which types of public information are excepted from disclosure in the PIA. This Court previously acknowledged that this is the Legislature’s role. “Although we recognize that there is often much potential for abuse of information in government records, the task of balancing the public’s right of access to government records against potential abuses of the right has been made by the Legislature; the court’s task is to enforce the public’s right of access given by the Act.” Indus. Found. of the S. v. Tex. Indus. Accident Bd. , 540 S.W.2d 668, 675 (Tex. 1976). The Legislature excepted information for privacy reasons if it has been “considered to be confidential by law, either constitutional, statutory, or by judicial decision.” Tex. Gov’t Code § 552.101. We are constrained therefore not to apply a different, or more expansive meaning of “confidential” for purposes of section 552.101 because it might be good policy to prevent the disclosure of certain information. Our task is to enforce the public’s right to access given by the PIA and adhere to the language of section 552.101 and the statutory scheme set up by the PIA, “not to second-guess the policy choices” that inform these statutes. See McIntyre v. Ramirez , 109 S.W.3d 747, 748 (Tex. 2003). Nowhere in the PIA has the Legislature specifically excepted general birth date information, birth date information combined with other identifying information, or information the disclosure of which is feared may lead to identity theft. The Legislature has enacted specific statutes to protect against identity theft. See Tex. Bus. & Com. Code §§ 72.004, 521.001–523.053. My inquiry, then, is whether birth date information is “confidential” pursuant to section 552.101.
Section 552.101 of the PIA Section 552.101 of the PIA states that public information is excepted from the broad disclosure “requirements of Section 552.021 if it is information considered to be confidential . . . by judicial decision.” Relying on the opinion in Industrial Foundation , the Comptroller argues that the release of birth date information would violate the tort of intrusion upon seclusion. Therefore, she argues, such information has been considered to be confidential by the judicial decision in Billings v. Atkinson and is excepted from disclosure by section 552.101. This Court’s only interpretation of section 552.101 was the subject of a fractured opinion (a three justice plurality, two separate concurrences, and a four justice dissent) in Industrial Foundation of the South v. Texas Industrial Accident Board. , 540 S.W.2d 668, 675 (Tex. 1976). Despite the various views of the Industrial Foundation Court, there was unanimity on the proposition that the PIA does not give courts the discretion to secret certain information from the public by creating new categories of confidential information not protected by the terms of the PIA. In Industrial Foundation , the petitioners argued that the Legislature intended section 552.101 “to delegate to the courts a duty to determine what information should be excepted from disclosure as confidential by balancing in each case the interest in privacy against the interest in disclosure, thus creating a common-law privacy doctrine which would except the information involved ‘by judicial decision.’” Indus. Found. , 540 S.W.2d at 681 . The Court rejected that argument: We do not believe that a court is free to balance the public’s interest in disclosure against the harm resulting to an individual by reason of such disclosure. This policy determination was made by the Legislature when it enacted the statute. “All information collected, assembled, or maintained by governmental bodies” is subject to disclosure unless specifically excepted . We decline to adopt an interpretation which would allow the court in its discretion to deny disclosure even though there is no specific exception provided. Id . at 681–82; see also id . at 691–92 ( Reavley , J., dissenting, joined by Steakley , Pope, and Denton, JJ.) (“I agree with everything in the opinion of the majority except what is written to support the holding that information on the nature of the injury. . . may be ‘deemed confidential’ . . . . It was not the intention of the Legislature to turn over the administration of the Open Records Act to the judiciary.”). In other words, courts do not have the discretion to classify information as confidential on an ad hoc basis; confidentiality of public information is to be determined by the terms of the Act. To sanction the creation by courts of new types of protected information not identified in the PIA would open the way for judicial amendment of the PIA. Accordingly, I would interpret section 552.101 to deem confidential information that was held by judicial decision to be confidential at or before the time of the provision. This approach would leave policy-making to the Legislature. It would also provide certainty in the definition of confidential information so that governmental entities and public officials may act accordingly. If courts decided which public information is considered to be confidential on an ad hoc basis, according to what individual jurists believe to be good policy, a court could decide to make birth date information confidential under the PIA in order to further the policy goal of preventing identity theft. An immediate consequence of this might be the attachment of criminal penalties for the disclosure, apparently even if unintended, of birth date information. See note 10 . Government officials may be forced to redact all birth date information disclosed to the public or face criminal penalties, even in records that are decades old and currently made available to the public in, for example, all the state courthouses in the two hundred fifty-four counties around the state. 1 2 By limiting these determinations to information that has already been considered confidential, such as information the disclosure of which would violate the public disclosure tort, legislators can enact policy in a careful, deliberate manner, often preventing the substantial practical problems that may accompany judicial overstepping. A majority of the court in Industrial Foundation looked to the Court’s decision in Billings v. Atkinson , which recognized the tort of public disclosure of private facts, in order to determine whether the information at issue had been considered to be “confidential.” “We recognized in Billings . . . that an individual has the right to be free from ‘the publicizing of one’s private affairs with which the public has no legitimate concern . . . .’” Indus. Found. , 540 S.W.2d at 682 . The Court interpreted “confidential” according to its common dictionary definition—“‘known only to a limited few: not publicly disseminated: PRIVATE, SECRET.’” Id . at 683. The majority reasoned that the characteristics of the dictionary definition of confidential are “precisely the characteristics which information protected by this branch of the tort invasion of privacy must have. And, we believe that it is this type of information which the Legislature intended to exempt from mandatory disclosure . . . .” Id . Billings explained that certain information is protected by the tort of public disclosure. The majority opinion in Industrial Foundation held that the Legislature intended to protect this same information from disclosure under the PIA by excepting it as confidential (or private) by the judicial decision in Billings . Thus, “if a governmental unit’s action in making its records available to the general public would be an invasion of an individual’s freedom from the publicizing of his private affairs, then the information in those records should be deemed confidential by judicial decision.” Id . Reasonable minds may differ today as to the meaning of the phrase “information considered to be confidential . . . by judicial decision.” 1 3 But the Legislature has not amended this section of the PIA in the thirty-seven years since that decision, and Industrial Foundation is still our sole authority on the meaning of section 552.101. Tex. Gov’t Code § 552.101; see Acts June 14, 1973, 63rd Leg., R.S., ch . 424, § 3, 1973 Tex. Gen. Laws 1112, 1113. Respecting the Legislature’s prerogative and the precedential value of the opinion in Industrial Foundation , I would not extend it to create unintended exceptions under the PIA.
The Comptroller asks this Court to expand Industrial Foundation by holding that if the disclosure of information would lead to a violation of the privacy tort of intrusion upon seclusion, such information should be considered to be confidential under section 552.101. The Comptroller acknowledges that no judicial decision has ever held that information is confidential because disclosure of such would violate the tort of intrusion upon seclusion, and no Texas court has ever held that the intrusion upon seclusion tort can be violated by a disclosure of information. Cf. Valenzuela v. Aquino , 853 S.W.2d 512, 513 (Tex. 1993); Cornhill Ins. PLC v. Valsamis , Inc. , 106 F.3d 80, 85 (5th Cir. 1997) (applying Texas law); Clayton v. Wisener , 190 S.W.3d 685, 696–97 (Tex. App.—Tyler 2005, no writ); Wilhite v. H.E. Butt Co. , 812 S.W.2d 1, 6 (Tex. App.—Corpus Christi 1991, no writ). The elements of the torts of public disclosure of private facts (as applied in Industrial Foundation ) and intrusion upon seclusion contain important differences. The public disclosure tort has two elements: “information [is] deemed confidential by law if (1) the information contains highly intimate or embarrassing facts the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person, and (2) the information is not of legitimate concern to the public.” Indus. Found. , 540 S.W.2d at 685 . On the other hand, the intrusion tort’s elements are: “(1) an intentional intrusion, physically or otherwise, upon another’s solitude, seclusion, or private affairs or concerns, which (2) would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.” Valenzuela , 853 S.W.2d at 513 . The Comptroller attempts to expand section 552.101 to include as confidential by judicial decision information that would be protected by the intrusion upon seclusion tort. For this argument to succeed, the Court would have to redefine the intrusion tort to include the disclosure of birth date information that may lead to an intrusion (i.e. by an identity thief). This connection is difficult to make. For instance, if a burglar enters your house, reads through your private files and papers, and steals your credit cards and identification, is the publisher of the phone book from which the burglar obtained your address liable for the intrusion? The answer is, of course, no. The tort of intrusion upon seclusion can only be committed by “[o]ne who intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns.” Id . The tort is not committed by one who unintentionally facilitates the possible intrusion. Moreover, no Texas court has ever found a violation of the intrusion tort absent a physical intrusion or surveillance upon the seclusion of another, and the Comptroller does not cite any judicial decision that has ever made such a determination. Cf. Clayton , 190 S.W.3d at 696–97; Wilhite , 812 S.W.2d at 6 ; Valsamis , 106 F.3d at 85. Industrial Foundation is very clear that the question is whether the disclosure itself, not the requestor’s use of the information, would violate an individual’s right to privacy. “[I]f a governmental unit’s action in making its records available to the general public would be an invasion of an individual’s freedom from the publicizing of his or her private affairs, then the information in those records should be deemed confidential by judicial decision under . . . the Act.” Indus. Found , 540 S.W.2d at 683 (emphasis added). Justice Reavley , in dissent, also agreed that the Legislature is “concerned with confidentiality entirely apart from the manner of use of the information.” Id . at 692 ( Reavley , J., dissenting). The analysis should focus on whether the government’s disclosure would violate the individual’s privacy. For PIA tenets to apply based on the use rather than nature of the information would require government entities to obtain the reasons why the information is requested. This would contradict the clear prohibition in the PIA against government inquiries into the purpose for the requested information. Tex. Gov’t Code § 552.222; A & T Consultants, Inc. v. Sharp , 904 S.W.2d 668, 676 (Tex. 1995) (holding that courts may neither consider purpose of the request nor inquire into how the requestor intends to use the information). The Comptroller’s argument for extending Industrial Foundation to include an alternative analysis of section 552.101 using the intrusion upon seclusion tort is not supported by the provisions of the PIA.
The Industrial Foundation test holds that information “is excepted from mandatory disclosure . . . as information deemed confidential by law if (1) the information contains highly intimate or embarrassing facts the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person, and (2) the information is not of legitimate concern to the public.” Indus. Found. , 540 S.W.2d at 685 . I first analyze whether birth date information is highly intimate or embarrassing information, the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person. The Court in Industrial Foundation analyzed information contained in workers’ compensation files to determine whether it satisfied this element of the tort. The Court reasoned that some information would satisfy the “highly intimate” standard, including: a claim for injuries arising from a sexual assault of a female clerk following an armed robbery; a claim on behalf of illegitimate children for benefits following their father’s death; a teacher’s claim for expenses of a pregnancy resulting from the failure of a contraceptive device; claims for psychiatric treatment of mental disorders following work related injuries; claims for injuries to sexual organs, and for injuries stemming from an attempted suicide; and claims of disability caused by physical or mental abuse by co-employees or supervisors. Id . at 683. This is the deeply personal, highly intimate type of information the tort is meant to protect from publicity. The Second Restatement of Torts also gives examples of information that rises to the level of highly intimate or embarrassing. “Sexual relations, for example, are normally entirely private matters, as are family quarrels, many unpleasant or disgraceful or humiliating illnesses, most intimate personal letters, most details of a man’s life in his home, and some of his past history that he would rather forget.” Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652D cmt . b (1977). Contrasting this private information, the Restatement notes, “there is no liability for giving publicity to facts about the plaintiff’s life that are matters of public record, such as the date of his birth , the fact of his marriage, [or] his military record . . . .” Id. (emphasis added). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, interpreting Texas law, came to the same conclusion: However, none of these items of information — middle initial, age, street address, job title — can be characterized under Texas law as “private” and “highly intimate or embarrassing facts about a person’s private affairs, such that its publication would be highly objectionable to a person of ordinary sensibilities.” Texas invasion of privacy law in this respect has been guided by Prosser, Law of Torts § 117 (4th ed. 1971) and Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652D. Prosser, supra , states “‘[t]he plaintiff cannot complain when . . . publicity is given to matters such as the date of his birth .’” Id . § 117 at 858 . . . . The Restatement (Second) of Torts . . . is to the same effect . . . “[t]here is no liability for giving publicity to facts about the plaintiff’s life . . . such as the date of his birth . . . . ” Johnson v. Sawyer , 47 F.3d 716, 732–33 (5th Cir. 1995) (citing Indus. Found. , 540 S.W.2d at 682–84) (further citations omitted) (emphasis added). If disclosure of birth dates is held to violate the public disclosure of private facts tort, the consequence to tort law would be to potentially allow recovery for damages whenever someone publicizes information as “highly intimate” as a birth date. The public disclosure tort was not meant to protect such information from publicity. See Johnson , 47 F.3d at 732; Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652D cmt . b (1977). The Comptroller argues that the combination of birth date information and other identifying information, such as a name, rises to the level of “highly intimate” justifying exclusion from disclosure. She argues that because birth date information, in conjunction with this other information, can be used to access sensitive information, such as a social security number, birth date information itself is sensitive information. The argument casts too broad a net and misses the essence of the inquiry. How otherwise public information is used after disclosure does not guide the analysis of whether it is confidential and excepted from disclosure under section 552.101. See Indus. Found. 540 S.W.2d at 692 ( Reavley , J., dissenting) (“I read the Legislature to be concerned with confidentiality entirely apart from the manner of use of the information.”). If that analysis were determinative, much of the defined public information would be withheld because of a possibility or likelihood of it being used itself or in conjunction with other public information for inappropriate or illegal purposes. For example, that a person’s business address, race, and gender could be used by a stalker to identify and commit an assault at the person’s workplace, does not convert the work address into confidential information. In addition, the public disclosure tort focuses on the character of the information itself. Is it “highly intimate” such that its mere publication would be objectionable to a reasonable person? See Indus. Found. 540 S.W.2d at 683. How the information is used once it is made public, while of obvious concern to policy-makers who balance the risks in writing statutes, does not drive the analysis in interpreting section 552.101. Accordingly, public employees’ birth dates do not constitute highly intimate or embarrassing facts the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person. This information is also of legitimate public concern. The News contends that birth date information ensures accuracy in identifying subjects of newspaper articles, and the information has also been used to determine that criminal offenders have been employed by some public school systems. The Comptroller has offered no response to this contention. In any event, birth date information does not satisfy the first requirement of the public disclosure analysis, that the information contain highly intimate or embarrassing facts the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person. I would conclude that the disclosure of birth date information does not violate the public disclosure tort, and birth date information is not confidential under section 552.101 of the PIA.
The Court applies a balancing test following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Rose v. Department of the Air Force , 425 U.S. 352 (1976), to hold that birth date information is confidential under our PIA. In that case, the Supreme Court interpreted Exemption 6 of FOIA, which excepts from disclosure “personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Id. at 370 (quoting 5 U.S.C. § 552(b )( 6)). The Court held that the language “clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” in the statute was a Congressional mandate for courts to balance “the individual’s right of privacy against the preservation of the basic purpose of the Freedom of Information Act ‘to open agency action to the light of public scrutiny.’” Id. at 372. As noted above, the pivotal language in FOIA Exemption 6 is not contained in section 552.101 of the Texas PIA. The Court should not create a balancing test for the section 552.101 analysis when the language from which the test arises (“clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy”) is not contained in the relevant provision. See Indus. Found. , 540 S.W.2d at 681–82 (“Absent [a provision with the “clearly unwarranted” language], we do not believe that a court is free to balance the public’s interest in disclosure against the harm resulting [from] disclosure.”). Therefore, the Court’s balancing test is inappropriate here, and we should leave for another day whether a balancing test is appropriate for any determination under section 552.102, or, as the Austin Court of Appeals held in Hubert v. Harte-Hanks Texas Newspapers, Inc. twenty-seven years ago, that the test is the same under both sections. 652 S.W.2d 546, 550 (Tex. App.—Austin 1983, writ ref’d n.r.e .).