I know the US is a shitshow right now but please im looking for sensible answers.
I have some documents from a bank that need to be mailed. PDF is not an option and no matter how much i push for a secure email option, they still stick with slow turtle mail.
I live outside the US and this slow mail process has been very frustrating. And not just banks, any other business if you request some form of paperwork, their answer => MAIL.
That is very weird consider to mail the document, they need to type out an electronic version then print and mail it. So why waste too many steps?
And i just discovered today theres a thing called mailforwarding service… Aka you buy a US mailbox, letter gets sent to that mailbox then they help to forward those internationally.
In contrast to when I am in China and Singapore, EVERYTHING is digital. It is so much better that the only thing i carry is my phone.
Building a secure, reliable, accessible and privacy respecting identity management infrastructure would be a monumental task, even if only good-faith actors were involved. Unfortunately, good-faith actors are in very short supply these days. In places like China or Singapore, people have no expectation of privacy to begin with, so it’s easier to build digital services there.
What happens if your bank is hacked and it says that you have $1 instead of 10k in the bank? Do you have a paper backup at all? How about your mortgage or car loan?
What if it is robbed and the paper is taken? Do they have a digital backup at all?
A bank should spend the same amount of money on digital security than physical security. I mean, security is the whole point banks exist in the first place and why people trust them.
A non-cynical answer would be that for important financial or legal transactions, companies consider mail to be the most certain and binding, and the higher standard of evidence.
A cynical answer would be that mail-only processes exist to dissuade you from using them.
You’ll often find that accounts and services can be opened digitally but to close them you need to mail or phone. This is to make the company more money.
In cases where an organisation has to provide you information legally and can’t charge you for it, that might also be done by mail to encourage you to not bother.
For things like digital person-to-person money transfers, Europe solved that long ago by making bank transfers free and easy. In the US bank transfers are often a paid service, which is why people are still sending cheques to each other, and why the US has such a plethora of money-sending apps and companies all after a slice of the pie.
TL;DR - Money
While I fully agree thing should be digital (mail or fax are you kidding me?), very few business have secure email set up, especially for PII and health data. And even if they did, most consumers don’t want to deal with setting up encrypted email/PGP keys or anything like that.
Of course this could be solved with online portals to submit PDFs and things.
