superdave_gv wrote:... recall around 2005 that the state of Georgia had a downloadable file of all registrations in the state. It included state decal HIN, motor, owner address, etc. I did a quick search to see if it was still available and happy I didn’t see it.
I think that in the early days of companies and government agencies creating internet resources there probably were some instances of them providing a bit too much information to the public.
In some situations, there is still plenty of information available on-line from government agencies that might be considered a bit too public. For example, if you have the tail number of an aircraft you can usually look up that aircraft in an FAA database and get the name of the owner and some other information. However, in many cases, the name of the owner is just some LLC corporation, so you don't exactly get the name of the owner or his address. The same with the FCC website. If you have an FCC radio STATION license (of any type) you then will have a callsign. If someone knows your call sign, they can look up the licensee of that station and get information about them, maybe their name.
As for knowing a boat's state registration number, three sources have been mentioned so far, the pay-for-information website that costs $60 to use, and two engine manufacturer private dealer-only websites that would nominally only be available to authorized dealers, as being able to reveal personal information about the boat owner.
In the case of those engine manufacturer website, I would suspect that you probably need to know something about the engine, like its serial number, in order to get to more information. I can't say for sure, of course, because I am not an authorized dealer of a particular engine manufacturer and so far as I can tell I CANNOT USE those websites to see if they permit searching on state registration numbers as the only known information. But I would be surprised if they have that feature.
Getting back to the initial inquiry, I have not seen any free, on-line information resource where I could obtain information about a boat owner just by having the boat's state registration number.
I am not sufficiently curious to see if I could get owner information if I spent $60 on that pay-to-search website.
But there does seem to be an anomaly in the existence of such a search site: how did the search site get their information? Did ALL 50 states suddenly just send the guy who created that website all the information about their registered boats? Maybe you can get it from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. But usually you still have to pay for the time and effort it took the government agency to comply with your request, if your request is something covered in the Act.
But I am still skeptical that having a state registration number for a boat means you are able to get the owner's personal information from on-line sources without having to pay a fee. And, even more ironic, if a guy is selling a boat on-line, he generally will provide personal information so he can be contacted, like a telephone number or an email address. And, anyone that is about to buy a boat is surely going to know the owner's name because typically as part of the transaction the buyer will require the seller to disclose their name.
An Old Anecdote
Many years ago I was in the market for a Boston Whaler boat. I found an advertisement in a newspaper classified. The seller gave his telephone number. I called him, and we arranged a meeting so he could show me photographs of the boat, which he explained was kept at quite a distance away (actually in a foreign country--Canada), and as it was winter, was not really accessible at the moment. The seller proposed meeting me at a small coffee shop that was mutually convenient to both of us. I guess he did not want me to know where he lived. I can understand that privacy.