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How Long Should Companies Make E-Bills Available?
theodp writes "If you say goodbye to paper and hello to green, you may learn first-hand that no good deed goes unpunished. Try to pay your final Verizon Wireless bill online after switching carriers, for example, and don't be surprised if you get a sorry-Dave-I'm-afraid-I-can't-do-that reply. Other vendors may curtail e-Bill services 30 days after you end service. And a promise of access to up to seven years of paperless statements is somewhat empty if you'll be cutoff as soon as you no longer have an account. With more-and-more companies enticing consumers to go paperless, how long a period of time should the records be made available online? Should it extend beyond the life of an account?"
... i bet they are still available.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Is it me or are people just whinging about the smallest thing? I fail to see why any institution that I've chosen not to do business with, should continue to serve me for free. If a paper trail is that important, print a copy of the bill and file it, or create PDF of the online bill and store it.
Because statements sent from Bob to Alice would likely be intercepted by Carol who could use that information to the detriment of Alice. What we need is encrypted email, but since the majority of users don't care/couldn't decrypt it anyway, it won't happen until the process is made totally seamless which is up to us engineers. But since the banks are more often passing on the cost of fraud back to the customer and charging twice to insure an already safe bank account against identity theft - why should they care enough to spend the big bucks to do a proper job?
It is not immoral to create the human species - with or without ceremony, Samuel Clemens.
A chicken's quest? Probably meant "fool", but it's funnier this way. :)
Anyways the "paperless is green" idea isn't because we're going to run out of wood. Almost all paper is made from trees that are grown (and replanted and regrown) for that purpose. However turning that wood into paper and shipping it to the utility uses energy and money. Putting ink on the paper likewise isn't free, and mailing it (in postal trucks that burn gas) isn't free either.
Whether you measure in total energy spent or dollars, it's cheaper to have online bills than mailing out paper statements. Most places let you download a PDF of what the paper statement would have been, giving you the efficiencies of online bills while still being able to have a copy of old bills (and print them on demand).
Utilities push online billing because it saves them money; the fact that it also saves energy in the process and is more convenient for consumers is a win/win/win.
In my experience, paperless billing only cuts paper by about 20%. Companies and institutions that are savvy enough allow the switchover to paperless billing, are also savvy enough to have a continuous mailshot campaign. The result is that you are still mailbombed and sent changes to T&Cs, for example. The cynical view is that 'paperless billing' is Greenwash (go look that word up if you haven't seen it before) - it's really about saving the company money by not paying the third-party billing service.
>>>Because statements sent from Bob to Alice would likely be intercepted by Carol
So? My neighbors routinely intercept my snail-mail, and yet they've never sought to do harm to me. They just politely wrote "forward" and it eventually found its way to me. People have this false belief that physical mail is somehow more secure, but in reality it's just as vulnerable as email.
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