Attention, snoops and criminals! Got a hankering to poke into the private lives of your neighbors or friends? Looking for a quick and easy victim for your latest identity theft? You don't need to pull a break-in: A few clicks on your local county court clerk's Web site may provide you with all the information you need.

Court clerks have always maintained public records detailing some of the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives, from divorce filings to criminal proceedings. Now, many clerks are making those records available to anyone with an Internet browser.

In some cases, astoundingly sensitive information is available online. Ohio's public records law mandates probably the most comprehensive online access to court information in the nation. A cursory search through court records in Hamilton County, Ohio, gave me the names, birth dates, mailing addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and vehicle data of everyone who had a hearing at the court for a traffic ticket, for example. That's enough data for any stalker or identity thief.

"The top complaint the last three years is from people who don't like the financial matters in divorces being available, and the second complaint is that their Social Security number is available," says Hamilton County Clerk Jim Cissell. But he says that there's nothing he can do about it: The state's public records laws forbid court clerks to remove sensitive information from the records.

Of course, all this information has always been available to anyone willing to go down to the court clerk's office and ask for it. But in this case, the Internet really does change everything. If an identity thief asked a clerk for hundreds of divorce records, it would certainly prompt some suspicion. But that same thief can view or download thousands of records online without anyone noticing.

In one Hamilton County example, a job seeker was turned down because the prospective employer retrieved the applicant's criminal record from a data-mining service. A judge had ordered the record deleted--a not-uncommon ruling in situations involving less-serious offenses or young defendants. But the record remained available from the private firm, which had downloaded and stored it before the judge's order.

So should county court clerks remove all online records? It's not that clear-cut. After all, public records are supposed to be open to all, and online records can be a great convenience for many people. In addition, they're an important resource for the disabled. "If I take [the online records] away," Cissell says, "it's kind of like taking the ramp away from the courthouse."

Cissell is working with state legislators in Ohio to find a balance between unfettered access to court records and the risks that such openness can pose to the privacy of people listed on the records. We can only hope that the compromise they work out will set a national precedent protecting the public's right to know, while preventing the abuses that can result from posting personal data online.

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