The US$750,000 effort began in April 2005 and involved the review of over 30 million pages in more than 12 million public records for items such as Social Security numbers (SSNs), bank account information and credit card numbers. In the end a total of 777,635 pages --2.6 percent of the total reviewed were found to have personal data and were redacted.

It's not entirely clear how many documents, some of which date back to 1970, still might contain personally identifiable information, said Carol Foglesong, assistant comptroller of Orange County. "There's going to be something we missed," she conceded. "But I think we got 99 percent," of the items that needed to be removed, she said.

Orange County's efforts are being replicated across dozens of counties in the state and around the country as local governments scramble to pull down documents from their Web sites or black out personal data from images of title deeds, tax liens, court papers and other public records.

As by Computerworld earlier this year, such images often contain personal identifiers and usually are accessible to anyone with Internet access. That has made county Web sites a veritable treasure trove of information for identity thieves, according to privacy advocates.

Many county governments still have not begun to address the prevalence of personal data despite the heightened public concerns about heightened said B.J. Ostergren a privacy advocate in Richmond, Va. In most cases, such sites continue to leak all sorts of sensitive personal data to anybody with Internet access. In some cases, county and state governments charge for access to the information, but even then the fees are relatively nominal compared to the value of the data, she said.