In Bozzi v. Jersey City, the Supreme Court recently resolved a longstanding issue in holding that OPRA requires disclosure of the names and home addresses of individuals from their dog license records. But the impact of the Court’s opinion is not limited to dog owners; the Court effectively ruled that home addresses are not protected from disclosure by OPRA’s privacy requirement.

The majority opinion in Bozzi held that those who obtain dog licenses don’t have even a “colorable claim” to a reasonable expectation of privacy in their names and addresses. This conclusion rests entirely on the dubious assertion that “owning a dog is, inherently, a public endeavor” (emphasis mine). Even assuming this proposition is correct, the flaw with this analysis of the privacy interest, as identified by Justice Pierre-Louis’ dissent, is that “dog owners appearing in public with their dogs do not do so while simultaneously advertising their full names and addresses.” For this reason, as the dissent pointed out, dog owners likely do not envision that the government will turn over this personal information to the public pursuant to OPRA requests.

Unfortunately, the majority opinion did not follow this sensible approach, and instead adopted an analysis that provides virtually no privacy protection for a person’s home address under OPRA. After Bozzi, where there’s no specific statute providing confidentiality to an address in a particular record, OPRA requires disclosure of the person’s address. The only circumstance where a home address would possibly be confidential under OPRA’s privacy section is when the OPRA request for a home address is linked with disclosure of other clearly private information–such as receipt of financial assistance benefits (Matter of Firemen’s etc) or a person’s social security number (Burnett v. County of Bergen).

Apart from such exceptional situations, there appears to be no basis for withholding a home address under OPRA’s privacy provision.