David,

Those are great questions! Yes they can use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on handwriting. Even the wicked cursive from the late 1800's, (so they say) Did I see it with my own eyes? I'm sorry to say no I did not. What we as citizens consider private, personally identifiable information differs greatly from what the states are saying also. In Florida for instance they require by Jan. 1, 2007 ALL public records in custody by the recorder's office to redact the following.

RECORDS–COURTS–CLERKS OF COURT–redaction of social security number, bank account, debit, charge, or credit card number 
s. 119.07(3)(ff), Fla. Stat.; Ch. 02-391, Laws of Florida.

This brings up an even better arguement pose by one of the floor members at this conference. Forgive my interpretation of the conversation please...

The IRS will no longer file liens with the 9 digit account number which we all know is the SSN. They will instead only use the last four numbers.
The floor member said something like this. Anyone who knows anything about SSNs knows the first five digits are personally identifiable numbers and only the last four are random. "A 14 year old with enough time on their hands can write a simple number generator and figure out the remaining numbers base on location the document was found and approximate age of the person." The fact is no amount of redaction is going to help a person who has been targeted for fraud.

The scarey thing is I can buy leads from a Credit Bureau that shows for instance anyone that applied for a mortgage in the last three days with Countrywide home loans. That lead will give me the name, address and phone number of the person. A good hacker needs little more than this to gain that person's identity.

As far as your other questions David, I can't attest to them. But I will say there are some seriously powerful data mining software programs out there building title plants and automatically indexing them with very little human intervention. First American's CEO was there and said their title plant operations overseas are enjoying a very successful accuracy rate when checked by an abstractor.
Again, please let me clarify my position. I cannot possibly fathom the idea of writing a policy based on some overseas title plant from a person that barely speaks english.  It's impossible to know the little nuances of every area, that's what abstractors are for. but, they seem perfectly happy to cough up a committment in fifteen minutes because that's what the lenders demand.

In my humble opinion, the lenders and realtors need a hard slap on the face to make them wake up and get educated on what title insurance is and how important the information is to be correct. Our biggest problem in this industry is education. People just don't know what title insurance is how important to the transaction it is. Furthermore, cut rate abstractors have sacrificed their own credibility by lowering fees. They don't place enough value on their own product or knowledge. If you have been an abstractor for over 20 years then companies should pay you premium dollars for your knowledge, instead people cut their fees, just to stay in business. There needs to be a unified voice and a line drawn. Give it a  little while after those marvelous computers miss a lien and an underwriter gets sued again, maybe they will then see the value of human eyes and mind.

George