Uncle Sam may or may not be watching you. But if you have a mortgage, your lender could be.

Black Knight Financial Services is an analytical and data firm that has deals with 23 of the top 25 loan originators, and all of the top 25 mortgage servicers. The company recently introduced new software that can reveal any number of things about your personal situation.

If you put your home up for sale, for example, the program can flag your account with your lender or servicer. That way, Black Knight officials said at a recent press briefing, you can be contacted and offered a new loan on your new place -- before you even find it. Or maybe they can allow you to carry your old loan with you to help cover the cost of the new residence.

Another possibility: If you stop paying your recurring monthly bills such as cable, cellphone or utilities, the software will mark your account for the lender, who can call and ask what the company can do to help you out. Lenders know that pretty soon, in such cases, you'll start getting behind on your mortgage; perhaps an offer of help to manage your finances -- say, reworking your mortgage so your monthly payment is lower -- can protect them from losing you to foreclosure.

And how about this: The software will tell lenders and servicers if you place subsequent liens on your property. That way, they'll know if your debt-to-income ratio has exceeded their particular benchmark. If it does, they can start to watch your account very carefully.

Black Knight says it tracks postings 24/7 from 3,000 courthouses nationwide to collect the data to support this scenario.

"If such a program was in place a decade ago, when people took out an 80 percent first mortgage, a 20 percent second mortgage and a 25 percent home equity loan -- all with different lenders who didn't know of the others -- there may not have been a housing recession," a Black Knight spokesman told me.

OVERALL, HOMEOWNERS SITTING PRETTY

While some people always struggle to get into homeownership, folks on the other side of that "velvet rope" have it made, according to Ben Graboske of Black Knight Financial Services.

"If you are a homeowner today, life is good," says Graboske.

As an indication that current owners are in "really good shape," take note that home equity in the last year has grown by $1 trillion nationally, bringing the total to $7.6 trillion. Of that, says Graboske, $4.5 trillion is sitting there ready to be tapped, even with today's super-tight lending standards.

And that's just for the people who have one of today's 30 million active mortgages. There's no telling how much equity mortgage-free owners are sitting on.

According to Graboske, owners are tapping into their equity at great numbers these days. But if that sounds like people are pulling too much money out of their homes, as they did in the run-up to the housing recession that brought the economy to its knees, have no fear.

The average home equity loan taken out by owners is $67,000. But even after that, the average borrower still has 32 percent of their equity left.

Another sign of the strength of the house market: Put the typical primary mortgage and home equity loan together, and the total loan-to-value ratio is a mere 68 percent -- a ratio almost every lender can live with. Better yet, the average credit score of a home equity borrower these days is 782, the "highest on record," says Graboske.

DON'T FALL FOR LATEST DOOR-TO-DOOR SCAM

Your home alarm system may alert you and the authorities about a would-be burglar scratching at your rear window. But it will do nothing to protect you from the latest scam making the rounds these days. In fact, the criminals are taking advantage of alarm systems to get into homes, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

How's that work, you ask? Simple, really. A fake sales agent knocks on your door, claiming he's there to upgrade your system. If you are gullible enough to allow him in -- and many people are, it seems -- he yanks out your system and installs a completely new one. Then he asks you to sign a document, which just happens to be a new contract.

Most people don't know they've been scammed until they get a call from the original home security company -- or until they start receiving bills from two outfits.

If you think you've been had, here's what the consumer watchdog agency says to do:

-- If the salesperson says he works for your current company and that he wants to upgrade your system, or he claims your company has gone out of business and that his firm has taken over their accounts, check his ID. Call your current company using the phone number on the paperwork you already have.

-- It's always safer to say no to salespeople before they enter the house than to ask them to leave once they are inside. So do your due diligence at the door, not in the hall or kitchen. And if they won't leave, call the cops.

-- Always beware of limited-time offers: "today only," for example, or "Act now to protect yourself from crime sprees in your neighborhood." Report such high-pressure tactics directly to the FTC at ftccomplaintassistant.gov.

Each year, like clockwork, Uncle Sam calls all of the country's mortgage lenders on the carpet to prove they are making mortgage money available to everybody, everywhere -- not skipping over an ethnic group here or a county there.

There's an awful lot of data in the report that some call the mortgage census -- formally, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), created by Congress in 1975. The law was intended to give hard data on lending and mortgage investment -- or the lack of it -- to minority groups and other communities.

The data collected under HMDA offers a cornucopia of mortgage information, like which companies are the largest lenders, what percentage of loans were on single-family houses, how many loans were sold by lenders into the secondary mortgage market, and how many first liens there were versus other liens.

2014's epic report has now been released: It includes numbers from 7,000 lenders and information from nearly 10 million loan applications. So what was 2014 like for the mortgage market? According to the Federal Reserve's HMDA summary, "House prices continued their upward trend evident since 2012 and mortgage interest rates declined throughout the year, although rates remained slightly higher than the historical lows reached in late 2012 and early 2013."

How difficult was it to obtain financing last year? "While mortgage credit stayed generally tight, conditions appeared to ease somewhat over the course of the year as the fraction of mortgage lending to lower-credit borrowers increased," according to the Fed. "However, growth in new housing construction was slow throughout the year, suggesting some persistent softness in new housing demand."

What percentage of the nearly 10 million applications in 2014 actually became mortgages? About 6 million. The dollar volume of those loans totaled almost $1.4 trillion, which is lower than 2013's volume, but somewhat higher than most industry pundits predicted.

The undisputed mortgage champ was Wells Fargo Bank, which made loans at a dollar volume that was twice what the next two banks originated, combined. The giant bank's total of $111.1 billion, about 8 percent of the total national volume, dwarfed Quicken Loans and Chase, which had about 4 percent each (about $56 billion apiece).

In professional football's annual draft, the last player chosen is called Mr. Irrelevant. In the lending world, that title would go to Affinity Bank, which lent only $20,000 in home loans in 2014. Rapid City, South Dakota's Telco Federal Credit Union was next to last, at a mere $24,000.

In going over the numbers, it's easy to lose sight of HMDA's original intention, which was to track loans to minorities and cull out lenders who were redlining or not making loans in the communities where they were located. But those figures are in there, too:

Of the $2.5 trillion in applications made to lenders last year, about 59 percent came from whites, and just over 20 percent came from minorities (blacks, Latinos, Asians, American Indians, native Hawaiians or people of mixed race). More than 1 in 5 applications were in the "unknown" or "N/A" categories, because many people do not fill in the "race" blank. But with minorities now around 38 percent of the American population, it appears that they continue to be underserved.

The disparity is even larger in the dollar volume of loans actually made, with whites getting 63 percent of all mortgage money last year.

Beyond those figures, HMDA also offers a wide-angle snapshot of the country's appetites for home loans. Of the 10 million applications, 89 percent were for owner-occupied units, with just 10 percent non-owner-occupied. Applications to purchase homes were just slightly more popular (51 percent) than those to refinance loans (41 percent), with just seven percent seeking home-improvement lending.

Together, the 10 million applicants sought nearly $2.5 trillion in funding, and 6 million borrowers were approved for $1.4 trillion. More than 9 in 10 sought amounts at or lower than the "conforming" mortgage ceiling imposed on investors like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. The rest were seeking "jumbo" mortgages, or loans made in amounts above the $417,000 conforming ceiling. (The ceiling is higher for many high-priced areas).

The average loan amount for a first-lien mortgage last year was $233,000.

HMDA allows interested parties to track data by state, county, metro area and even census tracts to see how many -- or how few -- loans were made. Take Corson County, South Dakota. Only four mortgages were made last year, at an average of less than $100,000, in this remote area near the North Dakota border. In other words, the county is hurting for mortgages.

Corson County is wholly within the borders of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, but it would be a mistake to think that American Indians comprise all of the 4,000 people who reside there. About a third of the population is white, and a little more than a third of the $326,000 in mortgages made there in 2014 went to whites. About 17 percent went to American Indians.

Freelance writer Mark Fogarty contributed to this report. The HMDA data was analyzed for the Housing Scene by LendingPatterns.com.

Would-be homebuyers and sellers may want to think twice about working with a real estate office where papers are strewn about and computers are left on for anyone to use at will.

Those are pretty good signs that the brokerage firm isn't careful enough with clients' personal information and is just begging to be hacked.

There are only a few cases in which data thieves have hacked real estate firms, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). But with the giant targets getting better and better at blocking hackers, the cybercrime experts believe that smaller companies like realty offices are next in line.

"What makes headlines are the larger data breaches," says NAR senior policy representative Melanie Wyne, part of the government affairs staff for the 1.1 million-member group. "But the trend now is smaller businesses. That's where the hackers are headed now."

Wyne, and others who participated in a risk-management and license law forum at NAR's annual conference last month, are worried that real estate outfits are not taking the necessary precautions to protect not just the identity of their buyers and sellers, but also their clients' specific financial information.

If companies aren't as diligent as they should be, Wyne says, they could be "the low-hanging fruit" easily picked off by hackers.

"If you are on the Internet, you can never be fully secure," warns Darity Wesley of the Lotus Law Center in La Mesa, California. "Data theft can impact your entire life. A lot of damage can be done," says the self-proclaimed "privacy diva."

Wesley says hackers "have become like artists; they're that good. They're very professional people. And I'm comfortable enough to call what they do organized crime."

Hackers are not just interested in swiping your bank account numbers, your Social Security number, credit card numbers and even your email addresses. They're also sophisticated enough to watch your emails to learn when you are about to close on your home purchase, then swoop in to snatch your settlement money.

The scam works something like this, according to Jessica Edgerton, associate counsel for NAR: Hackers observe your email traffic to figure out when closing is approaching. Then, they write to you and tell you to wire the closing costs to them.

Posing as your agent, or perhaps someone from the title company, it all looks official -- but it's not. And you money winds up somewhere offshore, says Linda Page of Fraleigh and Rakow Realty in Rhinebeck, New York. Page is a former chair of NAR's professional standards committee.

Wyne knows of one case where an unsuspecting buyer lost $30,000 to such a scheme. And she recalls another where a buyer decided at the last minute to stop her $100,000 wire transfer. Had she not, the NAR attorney says, the money would have been "on its way to Russia."

Edgerton says in recent months, her members are reporting an increase in this wire scam, so much so that she now advises agents to warn their clients ahead of time that a bogus email or snail-mail letter may show up.

But even if your agent doesn't give you a heads-up, your antenna should wiggle if you're on the receiving end of an email or letter advising you to send your closing cash somewhere. If you are, call your lender or real estate agent to make sure it's legit. Chances are, it's not.

Otherwise, when dealing with lenders and agents, you want to make sure they have made data security a top priority, says Wesley. Toward that end, she advises that all email traffic, personal and financial information, and the company's data storage should all be fully encrypted. If it's not, perhaps you should consider taking your business elsewhere.

Also, look for the "https:" rather than just "http:" in URLs. It's a protocol widely used for connections over a computer network, with the "s" standing for security, or more technically, a connection encryption.