It's unclear exactly how many of the 3,600 county governments in the United States do the same thing, said Mark Monacelli, president of the Property Records Industry Association, a Durham, N.C.-based industry group set up to facilitate the recording of, and access to, public property information.

But it's safe to assume that many of them are posting sensitive data online, based on the trend by local governments to provide Web-based access to public records, said Darity Wesley, CEO of Privacy Solutions, a privacy consultancy for the real estate industry based in San Diego, Calif. "I think a lot of [county] recorders have been putting [images of] public land records on the Internet without any concern about who has access to it," Wesley said.

But while the public access efforts raise privacy concerns, those worries need to be tempered with an understanding of the benefits from easier access to public land records, according to both Wesley and Monacelli.

"This whole topic of access to information is an issue that we as a nation are facing," Monacelli said. "We have real estate professionals, title companies, attorneys and lenders who need this information for commerce purposes." He argued that easier information-sharing enables more efficient mortgage and loan processes, for example.

"There's a real need to keep the information flowing," Wesley said, adding that while there's a real need to protect data "at all costs," there's little evidence so far that the public availability of personal information on government sites has contributed to identity theft. For most identity thieves, the effort involved in sifting through millions of public records for sensitive information is simply not worth it, she said.