• Car@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 months ago

    If I remember correctly, fax machines are still used because they’re a “secure” method of transmitting sensitive patient information. Regulations are keeping that inefficient dinosaur alive.

    They’re of course not secure, but people who are tech literate rarely draft this kind of legislation.

    • Dave.@aussie.zone
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      10 months ago

      They are point to point communication devices with no intermediate storage along the way.

      So from a point of view of “don’t store copies of this data except at the sender’s and receiver’s locations, which are already set up to handle sensitive data”, they meet requirements in a simple to implement manner.

    • Oliver Lowe@hachyderm.io
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      10 months ago

      Absolutely!

      Although… snail mail is also legislated to be secure. It’s not used as often because there is a more convenient, better(?) alternative: fax. I wish some funding for so-called “AI” projects could be used to develop even more convenient/better alternatives to fax. There are messaging protocols but they seemed crazy.

      Payment systems are crazy too. Stripe did all the boring work and now there is a convenient interface for payment processing: Stripe’s HTTP API.

      @technology @Car