Instead of wrapping "a lot of fear and sensationalism" around the issue, Wesley said, what is needed is an informed discussion among legislators, privacy advocates and business representatives. She has organized a working group, with 20 members from the private and public sectors, to create model legislation governing the redaction of Social Security numbers and other personal data from records.

The number of public documents that contain sensitive information may be far lower than people assume, according to Fogelsong. Orange County is using an outside company to inspect about 30 million pages dating back to 1970 for the data that needs to be removed under Florida's new statute.

Fogelsong said that 119,000 of the 7 million pages inspected thus far have needed to have data hidden from view, or redacted.

The number of redacted pages amounts to just 1.63 percent of the total that have been inspected, Fogelsong noted. However, she added, the percentage is expected to go up to about 5 percent in the case of older documents because many more of them are likely to contain sensitive information.

Baldwin said there is also less sensitive data than meets the eye on Broward County's Web site. "Most people's documents don't have [that kind of] stuff in them," she said.