Counties want some real estate records off Web
Counties want some real estate records off Web
York officials worry site makes residents more vulnerable to ID theft
PAMELA HAMILTON
Associated Press
COLUMBIA - Officials in two S.C. counties have asked a company to stop posting some county government land records online after concerns about the availability of residents' Social Security numbers.
Officials in York and Berkeley counties asked to have some documents removed from the Web site registered to Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc.
Clerk of Court David Hamilton asked the company to pull York County documents Wednesday after an inquiry from The (Rock Hill) Herald. On Thursday, Berkeley County Register of Deeds Cindy Forte said she would ask the company to remove its tax liens, documents that often include Social Security numbers.
Hamilton and Forte said they would wait for guidance from the S.C. Court Administration before making the documents available online again.
ACS handles government record management for counties in several other states, including New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan. Technology that would automatically remove Social Security numbers from land records is being developed but is not yet available, company spokesman Joe Barrett said in an e-mail message Thursday.
"Essentially, if this is an issue, it needs to first be resolved by states and counties, perhaps legislatively," Barrett wrote. The state of Florida has passed legislation requiring the removal of Social Security numbers from public records, he said.
The incident raises questions about the availability of Social Security numbers through land records on the Web, S.C. officials say. Online access to such information could make residents susceptible to identity theft, officials say.
Though limited information about land records has been online for several years, scanning land documents, such as deeds and mortgages, is a recent process.
In some cases officials are just beginning to ponder the privacy issues that can arise from posting such information on the Internet, Forte said.
Not all documents include Social Security numbers, but mortgages and other types of documents sometimes do, and the clerk of court has no authority to alter public documents, land records officials said.
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