Don't let the opportunity to comment pass you by!
About a month ago I posted my draft. Here's what I just sent to NYC DOH.
I urge New York City
to make birth and death records public and transfer them, on a fixed schedule, from
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to DORIS (i.e., the Municipal
Archives). I also urge New York City to not adopt further restrictions on when
vital records will become publicly available. With regard to potential identity
theft, this proposed rule is applying a sledge hammer to facilitate installation
of a thumb tack.
For death records, I
urge you to adopt a 10-year rule without restriction or, even better, adopt an
open records option (similar to some other states). The federal Privacy Act
does not apply to dead people. Probate law requires public access to probate
records so that potential heirs may be fully informed. As a result, for many
people, their death information is known. The vast majority of stolen identities
are from living people made vulnerable via their use of social media, use of credit
cards or response to email spam. Identity theft using names of the dead is an
extraordinarily small percentage of identity theft cases. I believe open
records, rather than restricted ones, are more likely to be helpful with regard
to the dead. For example, if companies had accessible death databases and
records, they would be less likely to accept credit applications using names of
dead people.
While the example
provided in the NYC proposed rule of protecting a living mother’s dead child’s
record (remember we are talking here about a mother who would likely be several
years past 90 years old), may tug at the heart strings, I urge you to also think
about equally compelling and much more common situations. There are many more people
who die without issue. Under current NYC restrictions imposed by the Department
of Health and Mental Hygiene, no relatives but parents, grandparents, direct
descendants or siblings may acquire death records even if those records are
more than 50 years old. It is impossible for anyone, including caring relatives,
to acquire the records necessary to allow adequate remembrance of their dearly
loved aunts, uncles and cousins. This is not only ridiculous, but also
unconscionable. Certainly, there are many more death records for people in this
category than for the child and mother in the first hypothetical instance.
The hypothetical
situation presented, highlights an important issue regarding background
research for any proposed restrictions of records access in New York City.
While there are few states that are currently more restrictive than New York
City regarding vital records, there are some states that are less restrictive.
Research on their successes and failures in this regard is relevant. Ohio and
North Carolina provide non-certified copies of birth and death records to all.
New York City is currently one of the most restrictive states. Yet, all three
states are about equal, statistically in identity theft. In “Facts +
Statistics: Identity Theft and Cybercrime,” a 2017 article online at the
Insurance Information Institute (https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-identity-theft-and-cybercrime ), they note that New York ranks
22nd (102.3 complaints/100,000 people), North Carolina 26th (96.1/100,000) and
Ohio 27th (94.8/100,000) among states. Clearly,
open records are not correlated with increased identity theft.
With regard to the
proposal to increase birth record restrictions, it is important to note that nearly
all of the PII on birth records is readily available for everyone to find via
the Internet. Birth records, themselves, are not the reason this information is
available online. This information is available because it has been required by
many government and private organizations for credit and land transactions and
is available publicly. Or, the information may have been stolen during any one
of many recent company and government agency data breaches. The PII DOH is
proposing to protect via vital record access restrictions is already publicly
available. Restricting birth records beyond 100 years in New York City will not
change this situation in any way.
It is also important
to note that, by the statistics provided in the proposed rule regarding birth
records, those over 100 years old make up but 0.4 % of the New York City
population. This same NYC-led sledge hammer-like approach to a miniscule issue
is stunning. It, like the proposal for death records, belies a callous
disregard for public access and government accountability.
Many jurisdictions
throughout the United States have open records laws, much more liberal that New
York City. New York City has been more restrictive than New York State for some
time with little or no explanation to the public for this difference and with
no discernable advantage for PII protection. Unlike New York City, New York
State and many other jurisdictions do not seem to view further restriction on
public access in the public interest.
I would hope that
actions with regard to further public record restrictions would be weighed
seriously and considered with regard to whether the solutions proposed will
have any impact on the problems identified. I suggest the solutions are
draconian and unwarranted and, most importantly, will have no effect on the identified
issue of privacy.
In closing, I would
like to suggest an option that seems not to have been considered: making
non-certified copies of birth and death records accessible to all with few
years of restriction (perhaps 75 for birth and 10 for death), but making
certified copies accessible only to direct descendants and those with tangible
interest. Since most of the information on birth and death records are already
available via the Internet, this would ensure that legally certified birth
records would be used and reserved for the most important purposes.
Emily Garber
23 October 2017
