Privacy

A website visitor sent me a thoughtful email questioning the ready availability of documents on our website in light of the ever increasing risk of identity theft. These documents contain names, signatures, addresses and some financial information (the amount of your mortgage or the amount you paid for your home). Back in 1999 when we first started talking about making document images available online, a number of people raised privacy concerns. At first, I would rather cavalierly answer that they were already public records, so why be concerned. Then I read an article by or quoting Judge John Fenton who framed the issue this way: a document reproduced in a dusty old record book on a shelf in the registry of deeds, while a public record, is only accessible to someone who physically travels to the registry, pulls the book off the shelf, and opens it to the correct page. Judge Fenton used the term “practical obscurity” to describe such a record. But put that same record online and anyone in the world with an Internet connection and a computer can see it with a few keystrokes. But as I read more about the Internet and privacy, I quickly concluded that all the momentum in this field is towards more speed and openness and, that while privacy concerns are certainly legitimate, they are probably best addressed by laws that severely penalize those who misuse this data. I know that our website has completely transformed the way that most people use the registry. The system has allowed registry users to be more productive, more efficient and waste less time. I don’t see how we’d ever turn back now. But privacy concerns are a legitimate topic, one that we should discuss again in the near future.