This is a step backward for a county that was way ahead of others in offering the public such access to public records.
Concerns were first raised at Tuesday’s commission meeting by Commissioner Bill McCamley. He was recently contacted by a constituent who found his own social security number on a home-mortgage document on the county’s Web site. McCamley said he was concerned about identity theft and thought the county should consider taking down the site.
County Manager Brian Haines, County Clerk Rita Torres and Assessor Gary Perez decided Wednesday morning to do that.
“I think this is the prudent thing to do. The privacy and safety of our citizens has to come as our top priority,” McCamley told me Wednesday. “That being said, we’re going to do everything we possibly can to come up with a solution.”
The change will cause a huge headache for title and mortgage companies, who rely on the site. They threw a fit in 2002 when the site went down for several months.
The county apparently plans to give some sort of special Web access to title and mortgage companies in the future. It’s the public that will have to visit the clerks’ office and thumb through paper records.
I’ve used this site extensively, and it’s rare to come across a social security number on any document. Such information is no longer collected, and exists only on public records that are several years old.
And those same documents, with the same social security numbers, will still exist in the clerk’s office.
I doubt putting those social security numbers online has resulted in identity theft. Those who are after specific social security numbers most often subscribe to private services that give them access to state Motor Vehicle Division records. Those who are after a slew of numbers steal them from credit card databases and other locations.
Most commonly, online identity theft involves credit and debit card numbers, not social security numbers.
Some commissioners said Tuesday they want the state to change the law that prevents them from altering public records, so they can redact social security numbers from these records and feel comfortable with them being available online. It’s an idea that should be discussed. McCamley also suggested to me the possibility of putting back online only records that don’t contain social security numbers, once the documents are sorted out.
But taking the service offline in the meantime, when there hasn’t been a known problem with identity theft using the
The reality is that public records are public. Technology is shifting to the Internet. In the future, all public records will be available online, regardless of whether they contain information some don’t like them containing.
How, then, will we be protected from identity theft? There are already lots of systems in place to do that. There are also ways people can protect themselves. They should be checking their bank accounts online daily. They should check their credit reports periodically.
Dumpster diving is another way people’s identities are stolen, and that’s why it’s important that records be destroyed before being thrown away.