Agenda Package - 02-21-11 - Laserfiche WebLink

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• January 11, 2011 LOGAN SYSTEMS, INC. P.O. Box 20844 • Greensboro, NC 27420 4003 Clifton Road - Greensboro, NC 27407 Toll Free: 1- 800 -342 -2208 • Fax: 336 - 299 -9905 Ms. Mollie McInnis Register of Deeds Lee County Courthouse 1408 South Homer Blvd- 2 d floor Sanford, NC 27330 Re: Redaction Proposal Dear Ms. McInnis: N As the Register of Deeds, you have to balance the need for public access to records with the concern that citizens have regarding potential identity theft. Since making your land records available to users on the Intemet, you have completed numerous conversion projects so users now have access both in your office and on the • Internet to all of the land records in the history of the County. The addition of these converted records to the Internet has allowed users to access virtually all of the required information for title searches without having to come to the office itself. In previous years, we have discussed the potential threat for identity theft based on these land records being made available on the Internet. We discussed the technology of the OCR process that could help identify personal information such as social security numbers and driver's license numbers. In an effort to address this concern, the North Carolina legislature passed the Identity Theft Protection Act, which required Registers to redact a defined list of items off the Internet site if requested by a qualified person (basically the person whose information was on the document). However, since this time, there have been very few people that have requested that personal information on these documents be reacted pursuant to that statute. This Identity Theft Protection Act did not address the proactive redaction of social security numbers off of documents made available on the Internet. There was some disagreement among Registers as to whether the Register had the legal right to remove social security numbers and other personal information. In 2009, the legislature clarified that a Register may proactively remove social security numbers and driver's license numbers from the records made available to the public on an Internet (remote access) site. Logan Systems proposes to redact all social security numbers and driver's license numbers from the land records displayed on your remote access site from 1935 (the year • in which the social security number was created) to December 3 1, 2010