Counties work to hide personal data

Jaikumar Vijayan with Computerworld interviewed several county officials and Public Records experts to learn first hand what local county officials across the country are doing and not doing to protect their citizens.

According to the Computerworld report:

Florida's Orange County Comptroller's Office recently completed an 18-month project, $750,000 effort designed to remove personally identifiable information from images of official records posted on its Web site.

It's not entirely clear how many documents, some of which date to 1970, still might contain personally identifiable information, said Carol Foglesong, assistant comptroller of Orange County. "There's going to be something we missed," she conceded...

Orange County's efforts are being replicated across dozens of counties in the state and around the country as local governments scramble to pull down documents from their Web sites or black out personal data from images of title deeds, tax liens, court papers and other Public Records.

As reported by Computerworld earlier this year, such images often contain personal identifiers and are usually accessible to anyone with Internet access. That has made county Web sites a veritable treasure trove of information for identity thieves, according to privacy advocates.

B.J. Ostergren, a privacy advocate in Richmond, Va. said many county governments still have not begun to address the prevalence of personal data despite the heightened public concerns.

In most cases, such sites continue to leak all sorts of sensitive personal data to anybody with Internet access. In some cases, county and state governments charge for access to the information, but even then the fees are relatively nominal compared to the value of the data, she said...

Last October, the council that oversees Washington's King County, which includes Seattle, passed an ordinance requiring the recorder's office to remove online access to all title deed documents. The vote followed when a council member discovered more than 200 SSNs, including those of several public figures and athletes, in title deed documents on the county Web site.

In another example, the recorder's office in Grant County, Indiana, pulled all its document images from the Internet in July after a lawsuit related to identity theft was filed against the county. "There are no definite plans to put them back up on the Internet although Social Security numbers will be redacted starting next year," said county Recorder Dixi Fischer Conner.

Travis County removed all document images from its Web site in June because of identity theft concerns and started putting them back online last week after attempting to redact sensitive information.

Software-only approaches are unreliable, said Dana DeBeauvoir, clerk of Travis County, Texas. "It's definitely not the automated process that software vendors will have you believe," she said.

Finding the resources needed for the task can be a big problem, said Sue Baldwin, director of the Broward County records division in Florida. "The main challenge has been dedicating sufficient personnel to review the 'probably qualifying' documents queued up by the [redaction] software," she said.

But the success of redaction efforts remains in question, said David Bloys, a retired private investigator who publishes a newsletter called News for Public Officials.

Bloys said he checked Travis County's Web site last week "and the very first document I found contained Social Security numbers, driver's license information and a home address on the first page," he said. Subsequent pages in the document provide details about the individual's financial, family and medical information, he added. There are hundreds of such pages still up on the county Web site. "Redaction just doesn't work," Bloys said. "I think the only way to really protect these documents is to make sure they stay within the four walls of the courthouse," he said.

Read the full Computerworld report

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