"I understand people's concerns, but a lot of this information has been freely available for public inspection since Plymouth Rock," Fogelsong said.

"This is not a new situation," Baldwin said, pointing out that Broward County began posting documents online in 1999. And because records have been publicly available "since the beginning of time," concerns about posting them on the Internet amount to "a tempest in a teapot," she said.

Wesley and Monacelli acknowledged that the availability of personal information online raises justifiable privacy concerns. But those worries need to be tempered by an understanding of the benefits, such as easier access to land records, they said.

"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."

There is also little evidence to show that the public availability of personal information on government sites has contributed to an increase in identity theft, Wesley said. For most identity thieves, the chore of sifting through millions of public records for useful data simply isn't worth the effort, she added.