SOS presenter: publish public data but protect PII — notary dataset example
Summary
In the CLE presentation, Colin Wetzel said the Secretary of State's Office collects detailed notary information but deliberately withholds some contact details from published notary datasets to protect privacy and encourage applicants to serve as notaries.
Colin Wetzel emphasized that although government agencies hold valuable data, not all collected information should be published in full because of privacy concerns and re‑identification risk.
Using the notary dataset as an example, Wetzel said the office collects residency and contact information necessary to commission notaries but does not publish full home addresses, phone numbers, or emails in the public notary datasets in order to protect individuals and avoid deterring applicants.
He urged data users to consider relationships between datasets, the risk of aggregating fields that produce PII in the aggregate, and to consult dataset metadata and reporting intervals before using data for analysis or making decisions.
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