Privacy Statement
The Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation (SDAT) has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for our web site.
Maryland law mandates that State agencies shall not create personal records unless the need for the information is clearly established and that personal records shall be relevant to the purposes for which they are collected, be accurate and current, and not be obtained by fraudulent means. State officials who request personal data from citizens must notify the citizens regarding the purposes for which the information is collected; consequences to the citizen for refusing to provide the personal information; the citizen's right to inspect and correct personal records; whether the information is generally available for public inspection; and whether the information is made available to other entities. Please refer to the
Maryland Department of Information Technology for additional information on information technology policies in Maryland. The State of Maryland is committed to providing you with web sites over which you may securely and confidently transact business with the State.
Terms of Use
These terms of use apply to the entire group of web sites owned, operated, licensed, or controlled by the Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation (SDAT). Please read these terms and conditions carefully before using this web site. By using this web site or any other site owned, operated, licensed, or controlled by SDAT, you signify your assent to these terms of use. If you do not agree to these terms of use, you may not access or otherwise use the site. SDAT reserves the right, at its discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions of these terms at any time. Please check these terms periodically for changes. Your continued use of this site or any other SDAT web site following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.
Robots and Screen Scraping
You may not use data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar data
gathering and extraction tools on this site. Anyone using data mining software will have their access blocked. Our data is available through a contractor, SpecPrint, Inc. Contact Stefanie Kokkinakos of SpecPrint at 410-561-9600 or via e-mail at skokkinakos@specprint.com
Disclaimer of Endorsement
Reference herein to any entity that is not part of the State of Maryland government or to any commercial product, process or service does not constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation or favoring by the Department of Assessments and Taxation or the State of Maryland. Additionally, the information included on this website may include links to information created and maintained by other public and/or private organizations. The Department of Assessments and Taxation provides these links solely for the information and convenience of its users. The inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement by the State of Maryland or the Department of Assessments and Taxation of that site, its contents, the owner of that site or any of its agents, members, or employees. Additionally, the link sites are not under the control of the Department of Assessments and Taxation and the Department is not responsible for the contents of any link site or any link contained in the link site. When a user selects a link to an outside website, the user is subject to the privacy, copyright, security, and information quality policies of that website.
Accessibility
SDAT is committed to making this web site compliant with the State's nonvisual accessibility requirements (Code of Maryland Regulations (COMAR) 17.06.02.01-.12). For more information on these regulations and guidance, please visit the State's IT Nonvisual Access Website.
Data Collected on This Site
The only data we automatically collect from visitors to our web site are their IP addresses. An IP address is a number code used to identify a computer that is requesting information from another computer. We track IP addresses to help diagnose problems with our computer equipment and to administer our web site. An IP address generally cannot be used to identify a particular user.
In some cases, we will ask for your name and contact information. In most cases, we request this information so that we may give you a complete response. If you decide not to provide this information, we may not be able to give you a complete response, or we may not be able to respond at all.
When conducting credit card transactions on our web site, you will be asked for the name of the card holder and other information. We are required by the credit card companies to collect this infomation before they will authorize the charge to your account. If you do not provide this information, we will be unable to process the credit card transaction. Your transaction will be cancelled.
This site contains links to other sites. The State Department of Assessments and Taxation is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of other web sites.
Security
This site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. The only information about web site users stored on our web site computers are IP addresses. As a result, any violation of the security barriers in place on our web site cannot result in release of any other information about our web site users.
Credit card numbers and expiration dates are not stored on our system. When you provide credit card information, it is routed to our bank's computer. Once we have received a response from the bank as to whether the charge is authorized or denied, the credit card information is purged from our system.
Anti-Virus Security Statement
It is the policy of the Information Technology division of the Department of Assessments and Taxation to utilize the highest level of anti-virus protection possible to provide a secure environment for the exchange of information and ideas. Although no protection is absolutely foolproof, the Department employs state of the art software to protectits networks from infection by viruses from Internet downloads or incoming e-mails. This protection is also designed to prevent the passing through of viruses from the Department’s e-mail system to outside recipients. Our detection software is updated on a daily basis with the latest virus signature files.
Attachments with specific extensions are prohibited from being received into our e-mail system. The Department also receives security alerts from the State security office. These alerts are immediately reviewed and the appropriate actions are initiated.
The Department has vigilantly maintained its anti-virus system and knows of no incident where it has transmitted a virus to a third party. However, there have been incidents where e-mail containing a virus has listed the Department as the sender. Please be aware that some viruses utilize the e-mail address book in a victim’s computer not only to further distribute the virus, but also to disguise the source of subsequent e-mails. If you should receive an e-mail containing a virus with a Department address as the sender, that address may have been copied by a mass-mailing virus from the address book in another victim’s computer.
Public Information and Personal Information
A major part of the Department's work is recording and disseminating information on real property attributes and ownership. This information is used for a wide variety of government and commercial purposes. With some limited exceptions, the Department is required by law to provide this data to anyone that requests it. We realize that some people are uncomfortable having information about their property available, but public availability of this information is necessary to assure that all property is uniformly valued at market value.
We are equally aware that some users are unhappy that we do not provide owner name searches and other more detailed information through our web site. Within the framework of the law we have attempted to strike a balance between reasonably protecting what some people consider to be personal information and what needs to be disclosed to promote public accountability.
