Their bet finally paid off in the s. The machines quickly became ubiquitous in the workplace. It was an exciting time. Or at least it appeared to be in the films of that era, many of which prominently feature a fax machine.
In , Back to the Future 2 laid out a vision for the future in which everyone had a fax machine in every room of their house , for example. But it also presented a new problem, according to Coopersmith. Before newfangled digital technologies emerged, people had to sign important legal documents by hand. You typically went, in person, to sign the papers, or you mailed them back and forth between relevant parties until every i was dotted and t crossed.
But the fax machine and other technologies meant that was no longer necessary. That habit dies hard. A start-up called PatientBank, which allowed users to share and receive medical records digitally, shut down in January , partly because weaning hospitals from fax proved too difficult. Paul Fletcher-Hill, a PatientBank co-founder, told me that one reason hospitals cited for their continued dependency was security: Many believed that hacking computer systems were easier to hack than fax machines—and that computer hacks were more damaging.
So while fax may be more vulnerable in individual instances, in the aggregate, it may be more secure. Fax also allows for interoperability: People with different information-technology systems and software applications can communicate easily, via one uniform technology.
In law enforcement, data-entry protocols remain largely analog. In rare cases, this reliance on fax can prove life-threatening. In Massachusetts, until recently, communication between agencies and the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families about suspected child abuse was happening almost exclusively via fax.
Two police officers were shot and killed in New York City in —and it was later found that the Baltimore County Police had faxed a wanted poster for the suspects to New York. Read: The end of the mail starts here. Still, outside of these instances, basic tech upgrades for law enforcement are not the stuff of great public interest. Even parts of the federal government preferred faxes over email for many years thereafter.
Not until did the Drug Enforcement Agency allow electronic signatures for Schedule II drugs like Ritalin and opiates, which comprised about 10 percent of all prescriptions. That meant a pharmacist could accept a faxed prescription but not one scanned and sent by email. The most recent FBI Criminal Justice Information Services policy allows faxing from physical fax machines without encrypting the message, but demands encryption for all email and internet communications, including cloud-based faxing.
Another reason faxing hangs on is because competing technologies are weak. The health care industry generates huge amounts of data for each patient. Federal privacy laws and deliberately incompatible standards, however, stand in the way. Specifically, HIPAA-compliant fax systems ensure the correct number is dialed and limit who can see received faxes.
Digital patient-information systems have struggled to meet the same standards of administrative, technical and physical security. Crucially, rather than forcing competing systems to be compatible in order to receive federal support, the administration believed the market would decide on a standard to communicate.
The faxing process is one that billions of people have ingrained into their consciousness. Place a signed document on the machine. Punch in the destination phone number. Hit the green button, and minutes later, your paperwork is in the hands of a colleague on the other side of town — or on the other side of the continent.
As long as the fax machine has paper, the cartridge is not out of ink and nothing has gotten stuck in the transmission process. In the mids, another history-changing technology exploded in use — the internet, which provided people with ways to instantly send text, pictures and documents, without the use of paper.
With the advent of widespread email, it seemed that fax machines were doomed. A study from IDC showed the four major industries that still use faxing manufacturing, health care, finance and government all predicted increased use of faxing over the next two years, averaging a 25 percent increase.
So, why's that? Faxing is a familiar technology that people trust. The complexities of the internet and its many offshoot technologies along with endless headlines about hackers, spyware, viruses and data breaches create in many people's minds a sense that the Web is not secure.
In addition, government policies still encourage faxes. And legal processes, like discovery, lean heavily on paper documents. Doctors fax prescriptions and privacy documents and patient records.
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