| In recent years, federal and state courts have revisited their policies for access to public records because these registers frequently contain personal information. Many of the identifiers necessary to commit identity theft, for instance, can be found in county-level property records and other public records.
Pennsylvania is the most recent state to formulate a policy for access to electronic court records. The proposed policy will eliminate Social Security numbers, full dates of birth, driver's license numbers, and full home addresses from electronic versions of court records.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center's (EPIC) comments on the proposed policy praised the policymakers for attempting to remove unique identifiers from the publicly available file. EPIC urged the policymakers to apply the protections to paper records as well, and to create a mechanism so that individuals can correct errors in court records easily. |
