More on Social Security Numbers

Up until yesterday, the social security number of Porter Goss appeared on his local registry of deeds website in Florida. Who is Porter Goss, you ask? He’s the Director of the CIA. Needless to say, now that the press has reported this situation, the social security number has now been blacked out on the records. According to the Associated Press article reporting this, Florida law already has set a deadline of 2007 for all social security numbers to be blacked out from online land records. I understand that there are a number of proposals pending in the Massachusetts legislature to deal with social security numbers in online records. Here in Lowell, we are going to do a sampling of a small group of our existing records to determine how many of them contain social security numbers. This will take some time to allow us to obtain a large enough sample (probably a six month period) and we will identify how many are attributable to federal tax documents, how many to Massachusetts tax documents and how many to other types of documents. Once we get this survey done, we will post the results here on the blog.