In what could be the largest single transfer of a county asset to a private company in the history of Texas, Fort Bend County Clerk Dianne Wilson recently sold every document ever filed with the county clerk’s office to a Florida-based company. Red Vision paid the county approximately $2,000 to transfer twenty million records by USB cable. This may also be the cheapest price ever paid by a private company for the bulk purchase of document images held by a government agency.
According to Wilson, this was just business as usual. In an interview with B.J. Pollack of The Fort Bend Herald, she said she sells the records "every day" in bulk to companies like Red Vision and has since 1995.
An asset that took Fort Bend County taxpayers 167 years to create and ten years to digitize was transferred to Florida in approximately 150 hours. Local taxpayers pay $1 a page for copies of their documents. Red Vision bought every document at the liquidation price of 10,000 pages for a dollar. With a mission to “revolutionize” the way banks, attorneys and title companies do business with local government, the company has more Texas counties on its shopping list.
Red Vision’s Website sells documents already purchased from Bexar, Dallas, Galveston, Montgomery, Tarrant and Travis counties. Additionally, the site indicates ten counties in Texas that are likely on its shopping lists. The counties all have one thing in common: the clerks in these counties make bulk purchases and Internet access possible by packaging bulky paper records into digitized electronic images ready-made for worldwide export.
Red Vision is only one of thousands of companies from around the world that monitor American counties for digitized documents to offer an eager worldwide market. A Google search for “public records” returns over eighteen million listings from companies claiming their right to emulate government repositories. These companies download the records directly from county Websites or seize the entire collection of images by Freedom of Information requests.
Among the eighteen million listings, you will find foreign companies like Infinity International Processing Services, Inc. The India-based data mining company boasts the ease with which they and their allies in China and The Philippines access 400 American counties to process 25,000 detailed reports a month. Other data-mining companies that conduct online searches of Americans’ private records are: Intelius, CourtRecords, IdentityCrawler, CourtsOnline, and ZabaSearch, WebDetective, and Public-Record-Searches.Com.
Intelius, for example, promises to search billions of public records to produce an eight-page dossier on anyone in America. Its Website reassures customers stating “no one is notified that you are using the Intelius services, including the person you are searching for.” Only American people and information are searched. Additionally, foreign customers are invited to pay in advance by check or international money order for profiles on U.S. citizens.
According to IdentityCrawler’s site, the company maintains one of the largest public records search sites on the Web, linking to tens of thousands of public records from the United States. The site also says that an individual can get information on anyone without having to hire a private investigator, as all the searches can be done online.
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