UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals “insane” say experts::Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years
UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals “insane” say experts::Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years
The answer seems simple. Digitise the wills and any of historical value as identified by an independent body made up of Twitter historians can keep the originals for prosperity and research 😂.
Digitise the lot and start with new wills. I understand the value to historians of keeping old pieces of paper but at some point the costs of that have to be evaluated against the benefits. You can’t just say “it’s of an unquantifiable amount therefore we need to keep them”, that’s such a lazy cop out.
In fact I’m increasingly frustrated that all legal documents aren’t digitised. Shuffling paper around is so backwards and a nightmare to search and index efficiently.
If I care about data never being altered without permission then paper wins over digital, no contest. Paper is not immune to forgery but you can’t automate breaking into millions of physical buildings to target certain individuals or mass destroy the documents.
That is why countries using electronic voting machines over paper should be considered an act of the poor, ignorance or corruption.
“Hanging chads” on paper ballots helped Bush swing/steal the election from Gore. Paper ballots have a lot of problems too. At least in California every vote on an electronic voting machine generates a paper ballot.
Paper systems have problems and years of experience solving them. Multiple parties with different interests watch to verify the input and counting process. Electronic is not watchable, tye result is unverifable - it’s not fit for purpose.
A government curated paper copy is hardly any more impervious to tampering than a digital copy.
If a government were so inclined, they could produce a paper resembling the original easily, just as they could a digital copy.
Now you could make an argument for digital records to require an air gapped archive as well, if you fear a fully online copy could be compromised by a non government or foreign government entity, but that’s not paper v. Digital, that’s online versus offline storage.
Note I was recently dealing with the estate of someone who died, and we had what we thought was the most canonical hard copy of the will, but the court rejected it as a duplicate and said the will was invalid unless we found a true original. Fortunately the will was within what we could legally do without the will (but with more work), but suffice to say a government digital record of the will would have worked better than any hard copy that we actually had.
I don’t know anything about tamping paper documents, only that it’s difficult in an election when everyone is watching and that we can’t watch computer bits.
Offline is certainly more secure than online but software is almost guaranteed to have bugs. An attack is potentially as simple as plugging in an USB stick into the right device anywhere in the chain of creating, storing and fetching the data to view the contents.
The convenience of a digital will may be overall more worthwhile than any security advantages paper has. I fear governments may require users to submit the will using their own proprietary ‘black-box’ software.
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But the counter to this is that when it is digitised it becomes far easier to search, to share, and learn from. So there’s that too.