State AG asks city’s DOB to remove phone, email records to prevent identity theft

By Atticus O’Brien-Pappalardo

The Office of New York State Attorney General Letitia James requested the New York City Department of Buildings to remove phone and email records from portions of the website in an attempt to limit identity theft, a spokesperson for the DOB told PincusCo Media.

The contact information was removed in recent days from portions of the DOB website that are easily scraped. The access to property owner phone numbers and emails has created a cottage industry of technology firms that resell the information to others seeking to sell their own services to the property owners. The scraping has been going on for years.

The emails and phone numbers remain accessible on PDF records that the DOB posts online. The DOB has one of the most open and transparent websites in the country for construction records.

Internet-related complaints including data fraud and security were at the top of consumer complaints made to the Attorney General’s office in 2020, according to a press release from March 1.

The AG’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

DOB Press Secretary Andrew Rudansky said in a statement to PincusCo that, “In response to a request from the New York State Attorney General’s Office, the Department has removed property owner contact information from our online public databases in certain instances where that information could be collected en masse by data scraping activity, in an effort to prevent identity theft.”

PincusCo recently noticed that the contact information in the “Owner’s Information” section of permit applications filed with New York City Department of Buildings’ BIS Web (Buildings Information System) had gone missing from both old filings and recent filings.

Below is a screenshot of the “Owner’s Information” section of a 2019 Alteration 2 filing from Boston Properties that was recently signed off on:

While most job types, such as new building, Alteration 1 or A1 jobs (known as Alteration-CO jobs in DOB NOW), and Alteration 2 or A2 jobs (known as Alteration jobs in DOB NOW) have transitioned to the New York City Department of Buildings’ new construction filing platform, called DOB NOW: Build, demolition plans are still being filled in BIS Web.

PincusCo found that these new filings, such as Extell Development’s recent demolition plans at 1710 Broadway in Midtown West (shown below), are also missing contact information.

PincusCo recently wrote about issues industry insiders were having with the DOB’s new DOB NOW platform, and will continue to monitor the situation along with the new developments with BIS.