Ostergren, who highlights such cases on her Web site, said the Colorado Secretary of State's Web site previously posted Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) documents containing Social Security numbers on its Web site. UCC documents are financial statements filed with the state by banks and other creditors when an individual takes out certain types of loans. But those documents appear to be no longer available online on the Secretary of State site, she said.

Richard Coolidge, a spokesman for Coffman's office, confirmed in an e-mail that the secretary of State has suspended access to the images in the state's secured transactions Web page, which contains UCC documents. The action was taken Sept. 16 while the state evaluates "what additional measures we can take to protect sensitive personal information," Coolidge wrote.

"We're also testing and developing new software to identify these numbers," in other documents, he added. Any time such numbers are discovered in a document or someone notifies the office about them, "they are redacted immediately," he said.

The issue of state and local government Web sites posting unredacted images of public records online has received wide attention. Privacy advocates have warned for sometime that millions of documents containing Social Security numbers are to anyone with an Internet connection, including identity thieves.

Less than two weeks ago, an appeals court in Ohio that a woman whose identity was stolen after an image of a speeding ticket containing her personal information was posted on her county's Web site can sue the official responsible for putting the record online.