Slashdot Mirror
Finland To Try Scanning Snail Mail
will_die writes "In an effort to cut carbon emissions and reduce costs, Finland's postal company, Itella, has begun a pilot program wherein snail-mail letters are converted into PDFs and made viewable online by their addressees, instead or in advance of physical delivery. The effort is volunteer only — a little over 100 people and around 20 business as of last month — but it has already sparked concerns in Finland about privacy and government overreach. The volunteers will have images of all their letters viewable on a computer or phone. The postman will still arrive twice a week to deliver the scanned letters, as well as any packages or attachments. Additionally, the postal service will filter out junk mail."
... but no one cares. (since it's too long to title as such.)
This seems like Zumbox on crack.
While the idea of receiving mail digitally has some appeal to me, forcing everyone to receive mail originally sent in a non-digital format as a set of 1s and 0s is... not quite the best idea.
I wouldn't mind receiving my electric, water, and cable bill as a digital sending each month (and I already do via email), but certain things (bills from collections agencies come to mind) are things that I, and ONLY I need to see.
Now, with something like this, if the ability to respond electronically to the mail were there and available to us, even if there's some sort of digital postage (at a reduced cost, preferably, if we choose to not send a dead tree copy of the same letter) that was needed, maybe it would start to appeal to more.
Best case for that would be when my doctor sends me paperwork to fill out before I come in. If I can log into a secure server, receive the forms, type in the data (memo: we need to have something other than Adobe for forms, ffs. Plain old HTML forms should be fine), and submit that electronically...
If the doctor needs a dead tree version at that point, they can print it.
april fools...
And if you get a birthday card with money in it? Who is to say you didn't get two 20's in that letter. The postal service was only able to locate one of those!
Or, say it's a private letter about financial information and now they have all your account information, oh and all your other personally identifiable information was in other letters that week so your identity is safe with you, and the person that opened all your mail.
It's just not a good idea in the long run. Maybe as an opt-in service for those who _know_ what is/isn't showing up in snail mail?
Finland is really a very small country population-wise, but decently sized in landmass. Under 6M people in the 8th largest country in Europe. This has to make mail distribution very expensive. Add in the weather (I've been to northern Finland in February- well below 0 with snow banks over your head) and I can see why they'd want to minimize or eliminate physical delivery. Its barely economical in the US, I can't see how it could be there.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I call bull on the "effort to cut carbon emissions" - this is purely about the costs and the carbon emissions are a byproduct (gas costs money). When I send a letter, I mean to send a letter. Not an electronic document. Now, this does not happen very often, so usually, I do communicate via email. I don't need the post office tampering with the mail. Furthermore:
"This (secure digital mailbox) is totally different from e-mail. It is comparable to web banking," said Tommi Tikka, development director at state-owned Itella, which runs the Nordic country's postal system.
So people's mail is stored on some server, probably totally unencrypted and requiring only a login to get in. Cue the hacking and government abuse - I can imagine it now; "We don't need a warrant, it's already in this database. People have no expectation of privacy when sending letters." (IANAL - or rather, "I Am Not A Finnish Lawyer" and really have no ideas of the laws in that country).
Luckily, this is all on a volunteer basis (for now), and I think from a cost-cutting perspective, it does make sense to reduce the number of deliveries by postman for non-express mail to twice a week since the volume of mail has probably shrunk (I have no statistics for this, solely based on personal experience).
Political Dissident: Hey, I sent out my anti-government newsletter to 1000 people. But only a few got it. What gives?
Government: I guess it was mis-tagged as junk mail. Our bad. Sorry it's already been deleted. No, we don't back up junk mail.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Old idea, new implementation.
PDFs instead of film negatives.
I'm a Finn. I've already got a filter for spam snail mail. I wrote "Ei mainoksia, kiitos" (no adds, please) to a sticker and placed it on top of my mail slot. The only post I get is postcards from friends and relatives twice a decade or so. Everything else is already digital..
How are emissions cut when the letters are still delivered? Wouldn't this actually cost more energy since they have to both hand deliver the original mail and use up power scanning and posting the copies? Not to mention the added labor hours required to do so. That looks like a cost increase, not a decrease. And, if they have enough spare employees to where they can actually spend time doing this, would it not be more efficient cost-wise to either just reduce those employees' hours(or move them to part-time) or lay them off altogether?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
We pay all our bills on line - barely any incoming bills, no outgoing checks - I have written maybe 3 checks in the last 5 years. e-mail has replaced most of our correspondence. The only thing that shows up in my mailbox is adverts and the magazines I subscribe to, and very occasionally stuff like property tax assessments and 1099s etc.
How about the postal service let me opt out of getting junk mail delivered? I keep the garbage bin by the mailbox for a reason - only about 5% of what shows up in my mailbox actually survives the walk up the driveway to the house...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Btw, you can still pay these paper bills online for free. I pay the small part of my dentist bill that insurance doesn't pay (have gone there forever, should find in network dentist) online. Plus, anybody you mail a check to has all of the info to get money out of your account.
Don't everyone's grandparents put steganographic checksums for enclosed money in the text of their letter? :P
Who's your Grandfather? Alan Turing?
Oh wait...
http://michaelsmith.id.au