All the talk about the privacy invasion and your identity being stolen has made some businesses (credit card, phone companies, etc.) only request the last four digits of your SS# whenever they are talking to you about your own account.  What the public does not know or understand is that in the last few years mortgage companies have been adding the client's SS# to the document that is public information and now all over the internet across the world.  Remember when we all used to GUARD our SS# from each other?  Then schools started using them publicly for our children instead of listing their names.  What's up with the Privacy Act?  You know that I can not get my 20 year old's grades from the University that I pay tuitition to but someone in India can know how much of a loan I took out to pay that tuitition.  Someone said that we should all get out and vote this election year to stop the outsourcing..... Well, I have to tell you that outsourcing started when Clinton was in control for 8 years so voting in another Democrat will not solve the issue...AND... I know that the Republicans are said to be all for the big corporations who are all for cutting costs at any cost to the American workers so voting for the Republican will not solve the issue either.  Please do vote but not based on this issue.  So I agree with some of you who said it has to start at the ground level with your representatives.  Start with your County Commissioners or Town Council Members who are over the Register of Deeds Offices.  Three terms back, a North Carolina Governor mandated that all NC counties had to be online by the year 2000.  The plan was called the Governors Highway.  Not all of them are online.  The smaller counties have had problems getting online.  One of them has the Military Discharge Papers interspersed in with the land records.  Because these records are not public records they are having to be purged from the records before they can go online.  One other county that I know has a Registrar who wanted to gain revenues from his system being online.  He was going to charge a tremendous fee to sign on.  Of course, he found out real quick that he could not do that.  But in order to view his county's records online you have to register and get a password from his office.  Therefore, he knows everyone that is using his system.  The way the application reads he has the right to turn someone down although I don't know if he ever has.  I ran for Register of Deeds in our county's primary.  (It is hard to get through a primary in our county because no one even cares or knows what the Registrar does and they either did not vote in that race or just guessed.)  One of the things I planned to do if elected was to lobby for more control over who views the Register of Deeds records for the protection of my county's citizens.  You should talk to your Registrars and find out just how much they know about these issues.  (Most of them know nothing about the title searching industry.)  After all they serve the public too either by being elected or appointed.   Or talk to the computer companies that provide the online software and services.  HART, Inc. is the system used here.  I think that they are out of Minnesota so this system has to be used nationwide.  But something needs to be done to stop all this outsourcing in the title industry.  I personally like my job going to the courthouses and searching.  I don't want to be forced to sell real estate because a company can produce a search in 10 minutes that takes me hours to do.