What do lenders, regulators and thieves have in common? Answer: These
three groups are all interested in your data — how it arrives, how it
moves, where it goes and how it is stored. Their motives vary, but to
keep those three entities from adversely affecting your title business,
it is time to seriously think about how you store and secure data.
Paul Schwartz,
professor of law and faculty director for the Berkeley Center for Law
& Technology, is a leading expert in privacy law. He approached the
topic of data security at the National Settlement Services and
Compliance Summit in June, and many in attendance at the time were
caught off guard.
“Learning about your industry, what has struck
me is while you are aware of the risks of the escrow funds you hold and
you worry about defalcation and protecting that money, what the
industry has not been paying attention to thus far is how you control
the huge quantities of highly sensitive personal information,” Schwartz
said. “Personal information is the gold of the information economy in
which we now live and this industry has a lot of it.”
The motive
of the thief is obvious — he wants to steal the private information
gold for his own gains — but the increased attention of regulators and
lenders on information and data protection protocols is a somewhat newer
threat driven by an April Bulletin 2012-03, from the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau (CFPB). In that bulletin, lenders were told the CFPB
expects them to “oversee their business relationships with service
providers in a manner that ensures compliance with federal consumer
financial laws … the CFPB’s exercise of its supervisory enforcement
authority will closely reflect this orientation and emphasis.”
This is part one of The Title Report’s coverage of the data and
information protection issue and how your title business can start to
protect itself from harm.