Finland To Try Scanning Snail Mail 152
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."
Kind of like something that already exists... (Score:3, Interesting)
... 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.
I would prefer this... (Score:1, Interesting)
Finland has geographic issues (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Junk Mail (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Why is this necessary? (Score:3, Interesting)
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...