This is relatively consistent with my experience. I was, for a long time, trying to figure out how I kept getting insurance offers in the mail and TO MY EMAIL (I registered with the online DMV portal - whoops) upselling me on insurance services and trying to get me to change services near my insurance expiration. I've completely de-googled, I host my own email, I have no social media accounts tied to my real identity, and I run a VPN almost 24/7. I run a pi-hole at home and a slew of ad-blockers. They STILL figure out information about me. It's about time we follow the Europeans and implement our own GDPR in the states. It would be great to see us bankrupt these companies, and oust regulators for violating our privacy wholesale. For being the bulwark of freedom America really doesn't care about Americans anymore. It would be nice if we could talk about how bad privacy violations like this are for everyone. This is an awful piece of journalism. Including this person makes it seem like the DMV possesses some sort of log of people who are victims of domestic abuse/trafficking and is specifically selling their information. Piss poor, but I guess that's all you can expect from vice tier journalism these days.
The article is not perfect but it serves the higher purpose of alerting people to loss of privacy when interacting with a government agency. This a world wide-phenomena.