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The Delta County clerk and recorder’s policy of observing state law and making all public records available to the public on its website has encountered a question of privacy.
Delta County clerk and recorder Ann Eddins said that she is looking for a sensible solution. Eddins has written to the county clerk’s association attorney asking for guidance on how the office should handle public documents that contain sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers.
Information about individuals that is supposed to be private and closely held is available on the Internet on government document websites, including Delta County’s.
On Jan. 1 last year a Colorado law, HB 06-1156, went into effect. The law says in part that “individuals and entities” are prohibited from listing or posting SSN’s on line. There are exceptions. The law does not prevent “release of a Social Security Number as required… by federal law.”
That exception keeps the county clerk’s office from removing or “redacting” SSN’s from documents which are sent for recording from the federal government, Eddins explained.
The state law also allows the collection, use, and release of SSN’s as required by other state statute, for use in administrative internal verification, and for the Colorado Department of Revenue.
“Redaction” is the process of blocking sensitive information on a public document from public view while still allowing its use for internal verification purposes.
Some states have laws on the books allowing for redaction of information from documents, but Colorado does not, Eddins said.
There is some latitude in state statutes that might allow the county to prohibit the public from viewing certain documents on line. Some other Colorado counties only allow those who pay a subscription fee to view entire documents on line.
“Our policy has always been to make public records available to the public,” Eddins said. “Even individuals searching public records want to see the whole document and not just a brief reference to it.”
Some records aren’t made available to the public by law because they do contain sensitive information. Those would include certain voting records, and marriage license applications which are not publicly available for 50 years, Eddins said.
Some individuals and businesses may have a legitimate need for identification by Social Security number. Those could include title companies searching real estate records for issuance of title insurance and attorneys handling certain types of cases.
The county’s electronic recording software was installed a year ago and has been credited with increasing efficiency and freeing up staff time for other duties in the clerk and recorder’s office.
The software the county uses for its on-line postings does allow for the redaction of Social Security numbers from particular documents.
But Eddins said that she lacks legislative authority to block that information. Some types of documents on which the United States is a party must be scanned and posted exactly as received, even documents that contain Social Security numbers. That procedure is governed by federal rules and is an exception to HB 06-1156, Eddins explained.
Even so, a process of sanitizing documents already in the data base and available on line could be a lengthy one.
There are lots of documents in cyberspace.
There hasn’t been an indication that information from the county’s database is being used illegally.
Eddins said that she is in the process of getting some legal guidance from the county clerks’ association on whether complete document information containing Social Security numbers must be available both in the clerk’s office and on the clerk’s website.
The state law HB 06-1156 also contains provisions calling for disclosure that individuals have the right to stop the use of their Social Security numbers in certain cases, and also provides for instances where an individual may have use of their Social Security number stopped.
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