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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?"
They should provide access as long as one might reasonably need it which is at least as long as the statute of limitations give one to take legal action.
Thanks to Moore's law, there is very little value in deleting records except in very extreme cases, or when the data itself acts as an un-necessary liability.
If you assume that you have enough storage for the current year on hand, are you going to more-than double the amount of storage you need over the next 18 months? Very few business will say "yes" to this, and thus the cost of storing everything is DROPPING with each passing year, despite the ever rising amount of it.
We recently upgraded one of our D2D backup arrays from 300 GB drives to 1.5 TB SATA drives. For less than the cost of the original array of 300 GB drives, we ended up with 5 times the storage space in just over 2 years, meaning that the cost of the old data is now 1/5 what it used to be. We were profitable keeping that data 2 years ago, so in a sense, we are 5x as profitable keeping that same information today!
So why would we delete it?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My previous mobile contract had paperless billing, and you could either view the bill as HTML, or click the "Download" button which gave you a PDF to save. This was over SSL, of course. You could email it to yourself if you really wanted to.
I don't know if/when they'll close the account, but it's now been open for about a month after the contract ended.
If I asked for a duplicate paper copy of a bill in two years time, it would be reasonable for the company to charge me. So, I don't see why they should have to keep the bill-viewing service running indefinitely either.
Not being allowed to see the closing statement for your account is quite a big deal if you are unsure of the balance they want paying.
I am still going through this with my phone company. They didn't send me the final bill then dropped the account with debt collectors. When I called up to request a bill they added a $5 charge and posted it to the wrong address, after putting me on hold for about an hour. A full day of my time later I finally got a correct payout figure from them; and it was worth a lot less than the lost income.
Suffice to say, it's going to court this year to recover my lost income for spending a full day chasing the issue and not being able to work, for having to avoid getting listed on the bad credit register.
I drink to make other people interesting!
I thought this eBill thing was a neat idea when it first came out years ago for one of my monthly services. So I signed up for it. There was an error in my billing a few months later, and I called and had it corrected. Instead of showing up as a correction on my following billing statement, they had changed the original incorrect bill. Looking at my online account, everything seemed as if it had never had an error.
I canceled eBill immediately and refuse it from all other vendors now. I want this information for my own records, and I don't want them being the one who controls it and gets to rewrite history in case there was a problem.
I'd consider it if they could email me a PDF of the same document that comes as a paper bill. They can put all those other bells and whistles on too if they want, but I want a copy in my possession that they don't have access to change, without having to remember to save it out by hand every month, and in a format that gives me the legal leverage I need to be able to prove the document came from them (eg, email headers on the email with the attachment on a 3rd party mail server such as GMail).
EBilling is a way for your service provider to control history, and to deny you access to information which might condemn them should they screw up in some serious way. I need better control over this than ebilling provides.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
As for going paperless, I've not done it because I'd probably forget to pay the bill!
Heh, it's exactly the opposite for me. When I have a paper bill, I remember that I need to pay the bill, but never to actually do it. I'm always remembering "Oh yeah, I need to send that check out!" while I'm at work. I've even had an envelope with a check in it sit on my counter for weeks... all ready to go, I just needed to remember to take it to a mailbox.
With e-bill, I can accommodate my stupid brain, and pay it when I remember to do it, instantly. ;)
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
It's called a contract people. Are finally at the point where there is just no such thing as freedom of contract, and therefor contracts no longer mean anything?
Based on some recent dealings with with large companies, I'm becoming convinced that no, contracts don't mean anything any more.
Things like claiming someone owes them more money even after they've fulfilled the letter of the contract, then when it gets to court, backpedalling and saying they made a mistake, but it's too late now because they've already sold the debt to a debt collector. At that point, under the law here, *someone* has to pay the debt collector, and guess who has a pair of big guys come around and start accidentally breaking the stuff in your lounge room until you sign a repayment plan? I'll give you a clue, it's not the mobile phone company! Of course, you *could* sue the phone company to recover the money, except that they deleted your records when you were no longer a customer, so they stand up in court and say they've never heard of you and have no idea why they owe you anything.
It's not the only case I know of where the large company decides that it's too hard to abide by the contract they wrote themselves. I can see it having a corrosive effect on society around me. If you know the other side won't abide by a contract, and will make you fight like hell to even get close to it, why stick to it yourself? And if you can only break even by breaking contracts with the big players, why not get ahead by breaking your contracts with everyone else? After all, "everyone" does it now.