I'm subletting a room from a friend for the summer, a pretty regular occurrence in student towns, but there has been a few hiccups. First the current roommates don't want to give me a key until I actually move in, whereas my strong preference would be to receive at the start of my lease (I am after all paying for it, and I have over nine hours of driving to do on the day I move in, and don't want to wait around for some mysterious roommate to bother coming home). Second, the landlord has decided he wants my driver's license number. Back in first year, I would have provided it without a second thought, he wants it, I want a room and have it, why not? Now of course I am a couple years older, and hopefully a couple years wiser, so several questions popped into my head: Why does he want it? What is he going to do with it? What about all those identity theft specials the networks have been pushing for the past few years? etc.


It is has been rather common for some form of identification to be required when signing a lease, if you don't pay the rent the landlord wants to be able to track you down. I can almost understand that, but I think the reciprocal should always be true; the landlord should give you his identification so if he doesn't fix the washing machine you can track him down. But this isn't the case here, I'm not renting from him, my friend is, and likely my friend provided him with all appropriate identification. Should I fail to pay the rent it really isn't of his concern, my friend will be pissed off, but it doesn't effect the legal relationship they have in any way.


Should he demand my drivers license number, I will probably provide it, in exchange for his. :-)



I wonder what Canada's new privacy laws say or require about situations like this?

Comments »

No Trackbacks
No comments

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
 

Hi, I’m Paul Reinheimer, a developer working on the web.

I co-founded WonderProxy which provides access to over 200 proxies around the world to enable testing of geoip sensitive applications. We've since expanded to offer more granular tooling through Where's it Up

My hobbies are cycling, photography, travel, and engaging Allison Moore in intelligent discourse. I frequently write about PHP and other related technologies.

Search