A real problem with the Small Claims procedures here in England is that the time you can spend trying to figure out what you have to do and then going through the formal process can easily be worth more than what you would get back if you won a reasonable level of compensation for the original issue. Realistically, you might have to figure the whole thing out without the aid of a lawyer, because unlike most courts you typically can't claim costs for legal assistance even if you win. It seems that you also shouldn't expect to get compensation for your own time spent on the legal work, again even if you win.
I have previously made a genuine effort to go after a small business that blatantly ripped me off for a few hundred pounds by changing its tune and failing to deliver what was originally promised. I had some reasonable evidence of this and could have made a decent case in about five minutes for why their in-writing version of events was completely implausible. However, I gave up in disgust when I still had no idea how to actually submit my evidence after probably £1,000+ worth of my time and reading dozens of pages of official documentation, and I then discovered that I probably wasn't going to be able to claim any sort of compensation for all that time even if I won and even though a significant part of it was wasted by the other party giving me the run around.
Small Claims procedures, where you can get an official court ruling on a relatively minor dispute with very little cost to either side, are a great idea in theory. However, if you can't write down the important parts of the process on a single piece of paper in language a normal (not legally trained) person can understand and follow, the whole thing is in danger of wasting more time and costing more money than it saves. I'm sorry to say that despite being naturally inclined to litigate on principle anyway in a case like that, rationally I wouldn't even consider it in future if the case wasn't worth enough to hire a real lawyer at my own expense to help prepare even though I knew I wouldn't get those legal fees back no matter the outcome.
Business, just like everyone else. Do you really think anyone in regulated or security-sensitive industries, no matter their size or resources, has the ability to fully audit every piece of software and hardware they use? In reality they don't, even the industry giants in fields like finance or healthcare.
At some point, you have to make reasonable policies based on the best information you have, and to some extent, you have to be able to trust your suppliers. That is why Microsoft including non-security junk in what they present as a security update is such a big deal. That is why Microsoft including phone-home or remote control features in Windows 10 without clear and reliable ways to control them is a big deal. For us, they have lost that trust, and because we are concerned about security, we won't use Windows 10.
I hear you on the dialup thing. Some of my current work is in networking, so I quite often wind up running some sort of protocol analyzer or sniffer, and the amount of junk that's getting thrown about not just on internal networks but between local machines and Internet servers these days for non-obvious reasons is actually quite scary.
If you mean Windows 10 Pro then officially, no, though it's somewhat more flexible than Home. Pro in Windows 10 feels significantly different to Pro in earlier versions, because despite the branding it doesn't actually have the control that a lot of professional and small business users will require in terms of turning off remote control and phone-home behaviour.
You're setting up a false dichotomy. Don't forget that a huge amount of the business world is small businesses and independent professionals.
Those smaller businesses have traditionally run Pro editions of Windows, and in many cases will not even have access to Enterprise. The relationship of Home:Pro:Enterprise in Windows 7/8/8.1 is not the same as the relationship in Windows 10.
Plenty of those smaller businesses also won't have dedicated IT staff responsible for things like checking the background for every update and trying it out in a controlled environment before deploying it via WSUS, or spending hours reading up on how to configure new software not to phone home. If you want their custom, in any regulated or security-sensitive industry, then either you give simple, robust guarantees and controls, or you're probably out of luck on that sale.
Yes, this is the line they should never, ever have crossed.
You don't call something non-security a security update. Ever. You just don't.
I already knew a lot of people who haven't been routinely installing Windows updates for a long time because of all the junk Microsoft have been throwing in as "recommended". But at least until this week you could still trust that you should install security updates.
The scale of screw-up that crossing this line represents in terms of Microsoft's remaining credibility is staggering.
(I'm not the AC you replied to, but I have a similar position on this issue.)
And about the telemetry that most of this is about: I'm actually with a competitor of MS, but we too use telemetry as an incredible useful tool to improve the product for our users. I'm not sure what people believe is being transmitted, because they jumble this issue together with the ad business and personal information/tracking issue, but we have no interest in *your* personal data in a telemetry context. We want to know where our users encounter problems, and what they actually use and prefer, in their use of of the product to improve it.
I'm sure you do want to know that, and I've no reason to doubt your good intentions. The thing is, I work with clients in security-sensitive industries. So regardless of what you'd like to know or whether I believe in your good intentions, the fact is that if you have any phone-home behaviour that I can't completely and reliably disable, my business isn't going to use your product.
Also, it is a bit strange that this anger over tracking of personal data is directed at Microsoft while the really big elephant in the room on this issue is Google.
We don't use a lot of Google services, either, for exactly that reason. Just because we're avoiding Windows 10 in significant part because of the privacy concerns, that doesn't mean we aren't also avoiding other software or services for the same reason.
I'm very jealous. That's about the level of effort this should need.
Depending on the institution, my version would involve things like a recently redesigned web site where I literally can't read some of the text or figure out which parts are clickable in their obviously broken layout, the most annoying PIN-based TFA device I've ever encountered, adjusting various redundant form controls in completely unnecessary ways, and tearing out approximately 5% of the total hairs on my head.
And that's just the banks. As far as I know, most of the utilities and other services we use don't offer the ability to download a complete, self-contained statement in electronic form anyway. Not even the banks provide electronic copies of all the other contractual paperwork; the notable exception who do are our business insurers, who invariably send complete policy wording and certificates to us all together in a single message when we renew each year.
Please keep in mind that as someone who works in small businesses, I have dozens of different accounts and cards to deal with in personal and professional capacities, so I am very interested in efficiency and getting things right first time here. None of those businesses have any dedicated admin staff, so whichever of us does the filing for any company paperwork isn't doing their real job at the same time. Messing around with downloading everything manually, we could easily wind up spending several hours every month dealing with this stuff. In contrast, filing every statement we get by post takes perhaps 5 minutes twice per month, including time to have a quick scan down everything to check for any obvious items of concern, and we typically get sent written copies of the various terms and so on by post so those need filing anyway.
I wish all the institutions I have to deal with worked as sensibly with electronic versions as the ones that you and some of the other posters here seem to work with. Maybe UK service companies are just lagging behind in this respect.
They still wouldn't meet all of my criteria even if they caught up, but at least you'd have some chance of staying on top of all the manual downloads if they operated more practical systems such as some of you are describing.
"Falsified" seems to imply a measure of malicious intent. In the cases I'm thinking of, I'm willing to trust that the problems were straightforward screw-ups. Most of them could plausibly have been a combination of a simple data entry error and a lack of adequate safeguards to detect inconsistent data or impossible situations automatically.
But again, this doesn't really matter; the fact is that their data was wrong at the time of the problem, and my businesses and I suffered damage as a result. Having incontrovertible records of my own, independent of what the other party's records said by the time the problem was discovered, has generally been the most reliable and efficient way to get someone to realise the error and make good the damage. And often, evidence they supplied themselves prior to whatever incident caused the corruption is the most convincing of all from their point of view.
In my experience, once you can get a real person with the ability to fix the problem to look at the place where the problem occurred and say "Hang on, that can't be right", you're usually 90% of the way to getting everything sorted out. It's breaking through whatever processes and barriers are in the way that tends to take a lot of time, because almost invariably those processes and barriers will be designed without considering the possibility that their own systems might not be working properly.
The point is, I don't trust the other party to keep the records reliably and act only in accordance with the true situation. Perhaps you're thinking I'm crazy and paranoid, but my stance on this one is born of bitter experience. Here are a few of the organisations that actually have told me untrue things (in several cases, clearly impossible things) as a result of their own records being incorrect, causing significant harm to me or one of my businesses.
My government's tax authority
Multiple banks
A credit card provider
Multiple utility companies
Multiple software developers (in relation to licensing/registration)
In each case, the fastest way to get things fixed was to present our own robust evidence of the true situation. In a small number of cases we even took the first step towards formal legal proceedings based on that evidence. It's amazing how often someone on the other side seems to realise what is happening at that point and suddenly be able to see our point of view and fix the problem.
I do understand that in some of these cases I've probably been very unlucky. It's hard to know for sure what happened, because often the organisations that made a mistake will eventually try to fix the problem without ever giving any sort of explanation or any other statement that might admit wrong-doing or liability. In some of these cases, no-one I know personally has ever mentioned having similar problems to me (though in other cases they have, so I'm not that much of an outlier). But that doesn't really matter; these things have probably wasted several weeks of my life over the years, and my strict record-keeping has been what eventually got things straightened out, so I have no interest in giving that up for anything that isn't at least as useful just because it involves technology.
I guess I just haven't been as lucky. I've had a few disputes over the years with organisations whose records were "not entirely accurate". In some cases the data had blatantly changed, and while I might be willing to believe it was due to an error in their systems and not deliberate corruption, either way they can't argue with original printed records sent to me at the time something actually happened. Sometimes a business has been known to forget that although it had updated its terms recently, the deal we had was much older and the terms we had were different.
For this reason, it's not just bank statements that I keep, but also statements from utility providers, changes in terms and conditions, and so on. Any records with a financial significance, anything legal/contractual with my signature under it, I keep a permanent copy under my control.
As I've mentioned in other posts, for me whether that is on paper or electronic isn't really the big issue. However, if it's going to be electronic then it still needs to be automatically collected, provably authentic, and future-proof. I look forward to the day when we have systems that satisfy those requirements reasonably well, but a simple on-paper version always has and works just as well today as it ever did.
Sorry, I meant to mod the parent post (+1, Interesting), but mis-scrolled and so modded up the idiot AC's reply instead. So I'll just post this to say thanks for sharing some real world perspective, and to cancel the AC mod.
My bank keeps statements online for two years. I download them annually, when I start working on my taxes.
You leave your bank in control of the only records of your account for up to a whole year? You're a lot braver than I am.
Then again, I'm guessing you also haven't been the victim of an administrative screw-up that left officials you were dealing with refusing to believe anything you said for a few months, even though their own version of what was happening could not possibly have been correct. That sort of incident will make you pretty conservative when it comes to trusting others with important records.
... which takes less time than opening an envelope and filing a paper in the right physical folder.
You must have much better on-line facilities than anything offered by any financial service I have ever used (about 4 major UK banks and a couple of other financial services in recent years, split between me personally and various business interests). In none of those cases could I get to downloading and storing away a PDF in less than a couple of minutes of hassle.
You should talk to my dad. He thinks the web is fad, and it is just a matter of time till everyone realizes how silly it is and goes back to mailing paper letters written in cursive. I think the two of you would have a lot in common.
That seems unlikely, but I don't accept that newer or higher tech is inherently better. In particular, I think a lot of current technologies are faster and more convenient in some ways, but also obviously worse in others such as reliability, longevity, security and/or privacy.
I bet your dad still spends quality time with his friends instead of keeping up with them through vacuous, emoji-laden updates of 140 characters or fewer, though. He probably owns his books and music collection, too. Not everything that is high-tech is better.
It's an interesting idea, and possibly useful for other reasons if you trust them. (Mint itself isn't available where I am, as far as I know, but I can see the attraction.)
However, for important record-keeping and evidentiary purposes, using a third party is little better than trusting the original source. You still can't prove anything the third party says is authentic and original without at least an audit that is almost certainly not going to happen, and you still don't retain the permanent record under your own exclusive control, so if say the third party shuts down you've lost everything you thought you had.
No, it isn't sufficient, because it still relies on me manually going to their web site and downloading every statement for every service I use at the correct time.
And if I'm going to print it anyway, then from my point of view all I've got is what I had before anyway, but now at my own expense and in a format that is more likely to be challenged as fabricated if I ever have to rely on it in the event of a serious dispute.
But I don't just want "available online". That's the point. I also want automatically and reasonably securely delivered, so I always have a permanent copy of everything in the event of any dispute or audit.
When we have a system that gives me an effectively 100% safe electronic document vault, into which any service I use can push their statements, terms updates, etc. in some readily accessible and future-proof format, and over which they have no other control or influence, then we can talk.
So instead of having a copy already available to file, I should instead remember to go onto the web site of every service I use that provides statements, at the correct time each month, manually download that statement, and then save it somewhere completely safe and/or manually print it at my own expense?
And yet for most areas like this, the opposite will be true in practice.
No-one has ever broken into my home or office and stolen our entire filing system in seconds while we weren't looking.
No-one has ever remotely accessed the box file on the shelf next to me and rewritten the statement showing questionable transactions that we're currently disputing.
For bank statements, or any other official correspondence, what I really need is a (a) complete, (b) permanent record that is (c) automatically and (d) reasonably securely moved to be (e) 100% under my control.
So far, the only way that happens is if they mail me paper copies. It is remarkable that we have yet to solve this apparently simple problem with a more technologically sophisticated alternative, but until we do, I will continue to opt out of getting statements [only] electronically.
I don't expect a lot from average Joe. No-one can be an expert on everything, no matter how smart or well educated they are. This is one of the most compelling arguments for having experts in government to establish common ground rules in important fields through laws and regulations, and to provide public information on important points that average Joe might actually need to know. Unfortunately, this idea relies on governments and their experts to act in the interests of the public they are supposed to serve, and of course that doesn't always happen.
Also cheese and wine. It's well known that a serious criminal once ate cheese and drank wine, so we should impose international sanctions on any nation producing such dangerous substances immediately, since clearly it is a haven for hardened criminals.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe use Uber or Lyft instead of renting a Hertz car?
So to protest at questionable treatment of staff by Hertz, you're recommending people should boycott them in favour of Uber?!
A real problem with the Small Claims procedures here in England is that the time you can spend trying to figure out what you have to do and then going through the formal process can easily be worth more than what you would get back if you won a reasonable level of compensation for the original issue. Realistically, you might have to figure the whole thing out without the aid of a lawyer, because unlike most courts you typically can't claim costs for legal assistance even if you win. It seems that you also shouldn't expect to get compensation for your own time spent on the legal work, again even if you win.
I have previously made a genuine effort to go after a small business that blatantly ripped me off for a few hundred pounds by changing its tune and failing to deliver what was originally promised. I had some reasonable evidence of this and could have made a decent case in about five minutes for why their in-writing version of events was completely implausible. However, I gave up in disgust when I still had no idea how to actually submit my evidence after probably £1,000+ worth of my time and reading dozens of pages of official documentation, and I then discovered that I probably wasn't going to be able to claim any sort of compensation for all that time even if I won and even though a significant part of it was wasted by the other party giving me the run around.
Small Claims procedures, where you can get an official court ruling on a relatively minor dispute with very little cost to either side, are a great idea in theory. However, if you can't write down the important parts of the process on a single piece of paper in language a normal (not legally trained) person can understand and follow, the whole thing is in danger of wasting more time and costing more money than it saves. I'm sorry to say that despite being naturally inclined to litigate on principle anyway in a case like that, rationally I wouldn't even consider it in future if the case wasn't worth enough to hire a real lawyer at my own expense to help prepare even though I knew I wouldn't get those legal fees back no matter the outcome.
Business, just like everyone else. Do you really think anyone in regulated or security-sensitive industries, no matter their size or resources, has the ability to fully audit every piece of software and hardware they use? In reality they don't, even the industry giants in fields like finance or healthcare.
At some point, you have to make reasonable policies based on the best information you have, and to some extent, you have to be able to trust your suppliers. That is why Microsoft including non-security junk in what they present as a security update is such a big deal. That is why Microsoft including phone-home or remote control features in Windows 10 without clear and reliable ways to control them is a big deal. For us, they have lost that trust, and because we are concerned about security, we won't use Windows 10.
I hear you on the dialup thing. Some of my current work is in networking, so I quite often wind up running some sort of protocol analyzer or sniffer, and the amount of junk that's getting thrown about not just on internal networks but between local machines and Internet servers these days for non-obvious reasons is actually quite scary.
If you mean Windows 10 Pro then officially, no, though it's somewhat more flexible than Home. Pro in Windows 10 feels significantly different to Pro in earlier versions, because despite the branding it doesn't actually have the control that a lot of professional and small business users will require in terms of turning off remote control and phone-home behaviour.
You're setting up a false dichotomy. Don't forget that a huge amount of the business world is small businesses and independent professionals.
Those smaller businesses have traditionally run Pro editions of Windows, and in many cases will not even have access to Enterprise. The relationship of Home:Pro:Enterprise in Windows 7/8/8.1 is not the same as the relationship in Windows 10.
Plenty of those smaller businesses also won't have dedicated IT staff responsible for things like checking the background for every update and trying it out in a controlled environment before deploying it via WSUS, or spending hours reading up on how to configure new software not to phone home. If you want their custom, in any regulated or security-sensitive industry, then either you give simple, robust guarantees and controls, or you're probably out of luck on that sale.
Yes, this is the line they should never, ever have crossed.
You don't call something non-security a security update. Ever. You just don't.
I already knew a lot of people who haven't been routinely installing Windows updates for a long time because of all the junk Microsoft have been throwing in as "recommended". But at least until this week you could still trust that you should install security updates.
The scale of screw-up that crossing this line represents in terms of Microsoft's remaining credibility is staggering.
(I'm not the AC you replied to, but I have a similar position on this issue.)
And about the telemetry that most of this is about: I'm actually with a competitor of MS, but we too use telemetry as an incredible useful tool to improve the product for our users. I'm not sure what people believe is being transmitted, because they jumble this issue together with the ad business and personal information/tracking issue, but we have no interest in *your* personal data in a telemetry context. We want to know where our users encounter problems, and what they actually use and prefer, in their use of of the product to improve it.
I'm sure you do want to know that, and I've no reason to doubt your good intentions. The thing is, I work with clients in security-sensitive industries. So regardless of what you'd like to know or whether I believe in your good intentions, the fact is that if you have any phone-home behaviour that I can't completely and reliably disable, my business isn't going to use your product.
Also, it is a bit strange that this anger over tracking of personal data is directed at Microsoft while the really big elephant in the room on this issue is Google.
We don't use a lot of Google services, either, for exactly that reason. Just because we're avoiding Windows 10 in significant part because of the privacy concerns, that doesn't mean we aren't also avoiding other software or services for the same reason.
I'm very jealous. That's about the level of effort this should need.
Depending on the institution, my version would involve things like a recently redesigned web site where I literally can't read some of the text or figure out which parts are clickable in their obviously broken layout, the most annoying PIN-based TFA device I've ever encountered, adjusting various redundant form controls in completely unnecessary ways, and tearing out approximately 5% of the total hairs on my head.
And that's just the banks. As far as I know, most of the utilities and other services we use don't offer the ability to download a complete, self-contained statement in electronic form anyway. Not even the banks provide electronic copies of all the other contractual paperwork; the notable exception who do are our business insurers, who invariably send complete policy wording and certificates to us all together in a single message when we renew each year.
Please keep in mind that as someone who works in small businesses, I have dozens of different accounts and cards to deal with in personal and professional capacities, so I am very interested in efficiency and getting things right first time here. None of those businesses have any dedicated admin staff, so whichever of us does the filing for any company paperwork isn't doing their real job at the same time. Messing around with downloading everything manually, we could easily wind up spending several hours every month dealing with this stuff. In contrast, filing every statement we get by post takes perhaps 5 minutes twice per month, including time to have a quick scan down everything to check for any obvious items of concern, and we typically get sent written copies of the various terms and so on by post so those need filing anyway.
I wish all the institutions I have to deal with worked as sensibly with electronic versions as the ones that you and some of the other posters here seem to work with. Maybe UK service companies are just lagging behind in this respect.
They still wouldn't meet all of my criteria even if they caught up, but at least you'd have some chance of staying on top of all the manual downloads if they operated more practical systems such as some of you are describing.
"Falsified" seems to imply a measure of malicious intent. In the cases I'm thinking of, I'm willing to trust that the problems were straightforward screw-ups. Most of them could plausibly have been a combination of a simple data entry error and a lack of adequate safeguards to detect inconsistent data or impossible situations automatically.
But again, this doesn't really matter; the fact is that their data was wrong at the time of the problem, and my businesses and I suffered damage as a result. Having incontrovertible records of my own, independent of what the other party's records said by the time the problem was discovered, has generally been the most reliable and efficient way to get someone to realise the error and make good the damage. And often, evidence they supplied themselves prior to whatever incident caused the corruption is the most convincing of all from their point of view.
In my experience, once you can get a real person with the ability to fix the problem to look at the place where the problem occurred and say "Hang on, that can't be right", you're usually 90% of the way to getting everything sorted out. It's breaking through whatever processes and barriers are in the way that tends to take a lot of time, because almost invariably those processes and barriers will be designed without considering the possibility that their own systems might not be working properly.
The point is, I don't trust the other party to keep the records reliably and act only in accordance with the true situation. Perhaps you're thinking I'm crazy and paranoid, but my stance on this one is born of bitter experience. Here are a few of the organisations that actually have told me untrue things (in several cases, clearly impossible things) as a result of their own records being incorrect, causing significant harm to me or one of my businesses.
My government's tax authority
Multiple banks
A credit card provider
Multiple utility companies
Multiple software developers (in relation to licensing/registration)
In each case, the fastest way to get things fixed was to present our own robust evidence of the true situation. In a small number of cases we even took the first step towards formal legal proceedings based on that evidence. It's amazing how often someone on the other side seems to realise what is happening at that point and suddenly be able to see our point of view and fix the problem.
I do understand that in some of these cases I've probably been very unlucky. It's hard to know for sure what happened, because often the organisations that made a mistake will eventually try to fix the problem without ever giving any sort of explanation or any other statement that might admit wrong-doing or liability. In some of these cases, no-one I know personally has ever mentioned having similar problems to me (though in other cases they have, so I'm not that much of an outlier). But that doesn't really matter; these things have probably wasted several weeks of my life over the years, and my strict record-keeping has been what eventually got things straightened out, so I have no interest in giving that up for anything that isn't at least as useful just because it involves technology.
I guess I just haven't been as lucky. I've had a few disputes over the years with organisations whose records were "not entirely accurate". In some cases the data had blatantly changed, and while I might be willing to believe it was due to an error in their systems and not deliberate corruption, either way they can't argue with original printed records sent to me at the time something actually happened. Sometimes a business has been known to forget that although it had updated its terms recently, the deal we had was much older and the terms we had were different.
For this reason, it's not just bank statements that I keep, but also statements from utility providers, changes in terms and conditions, and so on. Any records with a financial significance, anything legal/contractual with my signature under it, I keep a permanent copy under my control.
As I've mentioned in other posts, for me whether that is on paper or electronic isn't really the big issue. However, if it's going to be electronic then it still needs to be automatically collected, provably authentic, and future-proof. I look forward to the day when we have systems that satisfy those requirements reasonably well, but a simple on-paper version always has and works just as well today as it ever did.
Sorry, I meant to mod the parent post (+1, Interesting), but mis-scrolled and so modded up the idiot AC's reply instead. So I'll just post this to say thanks for sharing some real world perspective, and to cancel the AC mod.
My bank keeps statements online for two years. I download them annually, when I start working on my taxes.
You leave your bank in control of the only records of your account for up to a whole year? You're a lot braver than I am.
Then again, I'm guessing you also haven't been the victim of an administrative screw-up that left officials you were dealing with refusing to believe anything you said for a few months, even though their own version of what was happening could not possibly have been correct. That sort of incident will make you pretty conservative when it comes to trusting others with important records.
... which takes less time than opening an envelope and filing a paper in the right physical folder.
You must have much better on-line facilities than anything offered by any financial service I have ever used (about 4 major UK banks and a couple of other financial services in recent years, split between me personally and various business interests). In none of those cases could I get to downloading and storing away a PDF in less than a couple of minutes of hassle.
You should talk to my dad. He thinks the web is fad, and it is just a matter of time till everyone realizes how silly it is and goes back to mailing paper letters written in cursive. I think the two of you would have a lot in common.
That seems unlikely, but I don't accept that newer or higher tech is inherently better. In particular, I think a lot of current technologies are faster and more convenient in some ways, but also obviously worse in others such as reliability, longevity, security and/or privacy.
I bet your dad still spends quality time with his friends instead of keeping up with them through vacuous, emoji-laden updates of 140 characters or fewer, though. He probably owns his books and music collection, too. Not everything that is high-tech is better.
It's an interesting idea, and possibly useful for other reasons if you trust them. (Mint itself isn't available where I am, as far as I know, but I can see the attraction.)
However, for important record-keeping and evidentiary purposes, using a third party is little better than trusting the original source. You still can't prove anything the third party says is authentic and original without at least an audit that is almost certainly not going to happen, and you still don't retain the permanent record under your own exclusive control, so if say the third party shuts down you've lost everything you thought you had.
I doubt that.
No, it isn't sufficient, because it still relies on me manually going to their web site and downloading every statement for every service I use at the correct time.
And if I'm going to print it anyway, then from my point of view all I've got is what I had before anyway, but now at my own expense and in a format that is more likely to be challenged as fabricated if I ever have to rely on it in the event of a serious dispute.
But I don't just want "available online". That's the point. I also want automatically and reasonably securely delivered, so I always have a permanent copy of everything in the event of any dispute or audit.
When we have a system that gives me an effectively 100% safe electronic document vault, into which any service I use can push their statements, terms updates, etc. in some readily accessible and future-proof format, and over which they have no other control or influence, then we can talk.
So instead of having a copy already available to file, I should instead remember to go onto the web site of every service I use that provides statements, at the correct time each month, manually download that statement, and then save it somewhere completely safe and/or manually print it at my own expense?
I'm not seeing how your way is better.
And yet for most areas like this, the opposite will be true in practice.
No-one has ever broken into my home or office and stolen our entire filing system in seconds while we weren't looking.
No-one has ever remotely accessed the box file on the shelf next to me and rewritten the statement showing questionable transactions that we're currently disputing.
For bank statements, or any other official correspondence, what I really need is a (a) complete, (b) permanent record that is (c) automatically and (d) reasonably securely moved to be (e) 100% under my control.
So far, the only way that happens is if they mail me paper copies. It is remarkable that we have yet to solve this apparently simple problem with a more technologically sophisticated alternative, but until we do, I will continue to opt out of getting statements [only] electronically.
I don't expect a lot from average Joe. No-one can be an expert on everything, no matter how smart or well educated they are. This is one of the most compelling arguments for having experts in government to establish common ground rules in important fields through laws and regulations, and to provide public information on important points that average Joe might actually need to know. Unfortunately, this idea relies on governments and their experts to act in the interests of the public they are supposed to serve, and of course that doesn't always happen.
Also cheese and wine. It's well known that a serious criminal once ate cheese and drank wine, so we should impose international sanctions on any nation producing such dangerous substances immediately, since clearly it is a haven for hardened criminals.
Maybe he only meant "outlaw effective encryption entirely" before. :-)