Over the past week, the Appellate Division has issued two OPRA opinions with strikingly different views of individuals’ privacy rights. The Appellate Division’s recent police dashcam video opinion, discussed here, dealt a blow to privacy interests in ruling that people shown in such videos have no reasonable expectation of privacy. A few days later, a different Appellate Division panel upheld privacy rights in concluding that home addresses may be entitled to privacy protection under OPRA. Brennan v. Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office.
The issue in the case was whether Bergen County had to disclose the names and addresses of people who bid at an auction of sports memorabilia held by the County. (The memorabilia had been seized from an individual by the prosecutor’s office). The documents showing the names and addresses were non-exempt government records, but the court held that OPRA’s privacy provision rendered this personal information confidential.
The court said that the bidders had a reasonable expectation that their names and addresses would be private. Notably, the court rejected the argument typically expressed by requestors seeking home addresses, that there’s no privacy interest because home addresses are publicly available. The court emphasized that there is a strong privacy interest when name and address is linked with other information about an individual; in this case, the additional information was that the person bought memorabilia, indicating that he may have a valuable collection. The court determined that the bidders had a genuine concern that they could become the targets of theft.
The court also noted another significant factor favoring privacy: the absence of confidentiality would deter bidders from entering an auction, thereby harming governments’ abilities to hold auctions to generate income.
The court concluded that these confidentiality factors outweighed the requestor’s limited interest in disclosure of the names and addresses. The panel reached the same result with regard to the common law claim for disclosure of this information.
As this blog has previously noted, there is little case law guidance on whether home addresses are protected under OPRA. Although the Brennan opinion is unpublished, it is still an extremely important case in showing that home addresses are entitled to privacy protection.