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News
County works to remove private data from web site : News : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisCounty works to remove private data from web site
| Clerk sets goal of redacting Social Security numbers from all documents by 2015
| by Matt Schury
| 12/24/2009
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Kendall County residents can now request to have private information removed from legal documents on the County Recorder's web site.
Kendall County Clerk/Recorder Debbie Gillette told the county board last week that she hopes to have all Social Security numbers stricken from legal documents on the Recorder's web site by 2015.
Gillette explained that she has all her staff working on the redaction in their spare time and that they have around 500,000 documents left to comb through.
"The staff has also been trained on identifying Social Security numbers on new documents that come in and they are instructed to return those documents to the people to have those Social Security numbers removed, Gillette said.
Gillette posted the documents, which go back to 1986, on the Recorder's web site at kendallcountyrecorder.net last winter.
Previously those documents were only available at the County Office building in Yorkville.
"They have a process by which they go into each individual document and block out the Social Security numbers from those documents," she said.
If you're concerned, your Social Security number is on a legal document you can download a redaction form by clicking on the redaction request link on the Recorder's website and mailing the form to Kendall County Record's office at 111 W. Fox St., Yorkville.
The form includes a checklist of numbers that residents can request to have removed including employer taxpayer identification numbers, driver's license numbers, passport numbers, checking account numbers as well as credit and debit card numbers.
Gillette noted that the numbers appear most frequently on federal and state tax liens and some older mortgage documents.
"People don't really realize how much is out there but I feel confident that we got the majority of them," she said.
However Gillette reported, that her staff has eliminated the Social Security numbers from all federal tax liens since 1986,
"The rest of the documents are hit and miss--mortgages are hit and miss you might get one in 50," she said.
Preserving privacy and preventing identity theft, are the major reasons for the redaction.
"The way the economy is people are doing crazy things," Gillette said. "They are taking numbers because they think it's going to help their personal and financial situations somehow."
Gillette's office began the redaction this summer and she acknowledged that finding the numbers can be rather tedious.
"Every document we have to go through page by page looking through the numbers," she said.
She mentioned that the system allows them to search mortgages by time frame and they have been going month by month.
"It's very time consuming," she added.
Gillette remarked that she decided to first upload the documents and then redact the numbers in order to expedite getting the documents online.
"Otherwise it would take us years to get online," she said.
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