I have seen a few denigrating articles in the media denying the fax and smarmy comments on the web questioning why would anyone want to use a fax in 2015? And it’s a good question.

Well I actually found out the answer as to why faxes still exist and I should say no-one was more gobsmacked than I.

I attended a technology symposium talk entitled “Back to the future: What’s new in faxing?” I attended for the very reason the aforementioned web commentators alluded to, which boils down to wtf? (It should be noted these people well selling fax software.)

It turns out there’s a good reason to use faxes and that is: because it’s a “peer to peer” technology it is not as easy to tamper with the data as it is with other methods used to send documents over the Internet.

I still had questions and asked if old style fax is so reliable tamper wise why is it ok to send fax by email – when you’d imagine a good old email would suffice?

And the answer is: time stamping.

Although fax(es) over email are indeed using the Internet and even in some cases are “in the cloud” they still go to a dedicated fax server which is peer to peer and time stamped at a few points.

The example they gave was: I could email you and you could easily doctor it and then send it on. Apparently in a court situation it’d be very hard to prove the original email was doctored and all the judge could do is read both emails, compare and contrast them and use fallible human judgement.

Whereas with a fax there’s a number of time stamp points and the original document is scanned. Even if a PDF was sent by regular email, person B could replace it with his own version and name it the exact same name as the original. This is why legal stuff is preferred by fax. Seems archaic I know.

I read of a French case where someone got off for something heinous due to fax ink in the courts not being replenished ergo faxed evidence was a no show and while it is shocking, infuriating for the poor victims family and total b.s. by the French legal system, the fact remains fax is still peer to peer and the lack of ink was down to human error. (Although I find it hard to believe the fax couldn’t be reprinted as even old fashioned faxes have a memory function, sounds extremely remiss of someone.)

The most amazing part about my ‘why faxes still exist’ discovery session was that loads of businesses do still use them which really surprised me.

However nowadays even faxed documents can be read by optical character recognition (OCR) and uploaded to computers in a digital form, so the French courts really have no excuse.

There’d be no misty eyes from me if it went but fax it seems is here to stay – although it does warrant a bit of technology investment to use email clients and utilise OCR.

Addendum

Since I first published this piece in linkedin pulse I have found out that If everyone used something called PGP for email then it is possible to achieve secure end-to-end communication, however widespread adoption ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. Also “big brother” wouldn’t be keen for everyone to switch to PGP as it will make their snooping much harder.