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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.
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.
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!