Finland To Try Scanning Snail Mail 152
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Soulskill
from the neither-rain-nor-sleet-nor-wicked-lag dept.
from the neither-rain-nor-sleet-nor-wicked-lag dept.
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."
If I wanted to send a PDF, I would have (Score:2, Insightful)
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).
Re:Finland has geographic issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Because raising the price causes the demand for mail to go down. Perhaps enough so that you actually make less money than you would at the original price. Which when you have high fixed costs in employees and post offices or the startup cost is the driving factor in cost rather than the marginal cost of production, can actually mean you lose money by raising prices. Business can be weird. Like I said, mail is barely profitable in the US, and it only remains so do to high quantities of junk mail. In the past the post office has been subsidized by Congress. I can't imagine its profitable anywhere in Scandanavia.
Re:Kind of like something that already exists... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is this necessary? (Score:1, Insightful)
What is a check, or a cheque? Living in Finland, I think I saw one in actual use last time in very early nineties - almost twenty years ago.
I must say this service is largely pointless, and primarily self-promotion of almost-monopoly post office. All the actual mail I get and care about is bills - that I could, with one call, convert to fully "electronic" PDF-only service. Otherwise, I get basically nothing of value, if pizza place menus are not counted.
Re:Kind of like something that already exists... (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe you are amazingly shortsighted that you think postal systems are irrelevant. Can you think of any other completely effective way to physically deliver large quantities of physical items to households covering a large geographical area, without the expense of storefronts etc?
I quite disagree that postal systems are dieing - I believe that in this day of internet shopping postal systems are becoming far more widely utilized than ever.