Assessor Abandons Privacy Control
Douglas County Has Over a Half a Million People
Update2: I will have another essay on this topic soon. Stay tuned!
Update: point of clarification. Past assessors have removed names from the search function upon request. This procedure is now being abandoned.
Walt Peffer, the Douglas County Assessor, has a lot of challenges ahead of him. He is trying to come up with ways to control property evaluations and taxation. Part of this means Douglas County has to update old software, including the property evaluation site.
Unfortunately, a mishap has occurred which deserves greater exposure. The County website listing home evaluations has a unique feature. Yes, you can search by address or click about on a map to determine who owns what. However, the site provides a way to search by name which infringes a bit too far on privacy. This feature makes it possible to target and harass individuals in a metropolitan area of over a half million people. How convenient this search feature is for those who want to hunt people down!
Yes, I know, you can Google a lot of people’s names and find some information about them, but the assessor site lends authentic information and therefore credibility. In addition, the site links to tax payments on property. Such information should be restricted to a procedure to prevent harassment, title theft, and other scams. Yes, the public should have access to public records, but a process for search by name should be in place to discourage impulsive actions and merely mining the site for information.
But to make matters worse, the County appears to have abandoned all concerns for privacy and punted it to the State leaving people to wonder what process they can follow to protect their information. Below is a copy of the text sent to property owners with privacy restrictions.
Oh, and here is an easy-click link to the link mentioned in the image:
https://sos.nebraska.gov/business-services/address-confidentiality-program
To make matters worse, the Website Development Team provides no timeline as to when this transition will take place. There is no direction as to how privacy restrictions can be restored in the change to the new software. To add to the problem, the image of the letter above is dated August 23 but was only received by the property owner on September 9. There is also no phone number, no email address or website to on the County site for further information and no clarifications.
What I can fault Mr. Peffer for is his failure to make a press release on this topic. I think he did not realize the importance of this privacy protection of names in the search field. The Website Development Team should have had more foresight to advise the Assessor of not only informing property owners but also the news media as well. At the same time, such a letter should have been more clear as to what procedure a property owner needs to go through to preserve their privacy.
To add more fault to the Website Development Team, they should promote privacy options as a feature instead of treating them like a technical bug. Unless the people of Douglas County start screaming about this, the value of privacy will be lost. Mr. Peffer will figure some of this out, but you should draw your Douglas County Commissioner to the need for privacy protections. See contact information at: https://commissioners.douglascounty-ne.gov/
There is more protection of public election information compared to your own property. I actually had to contact the Douglas County Attorney’s office for such information (https://andrewlsullivan.substack.com/p/the-sham-of-automatic-mail-in-ballots). Yet any drunk can punch in your name on the Assessor site, find where you live, and kill you while in a drunken rage. People have the right to privacy in protecting their property and belongings. Government has to respect such restrictions and government must be transparent, including how to protect your information, as well as being transparent about election information.
At best, the search by name and the showing of names in search results should not exist, but at the very least, the option to search by name should be restricted by those seeking privacy. You can view the features of the current website at: https://dcassessor.org/valuation-lookup
I hate to say it Andrew, but my feeling is that the authorities do not see the point in investing in privacy protection anymore, since they believe that nothing is private, that anything that has ever been put online (sometimes unwittingly by your average user) is accessed and made public, sometimes for a cost. When I was in the IT industry here in Israel, there was a database floating around that had complete contact information for every citizen of Israel. Though that snapshot ages (people move, die, are born, etc.), most people keep their cell-phone number. If that was running around freely, I imagine that up-to-date data can be had for a price. The horse has left the barn.
Wow! I had no idea! Thank you Andrew!