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UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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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.
What can it even cost, at a ceiling? A few hundred thousand a year? I million? Even a hundred million? I expect it's way less, but even if it's half a billion, that is pocket change in the first world. If your government can't afford to write off an expense that miniscule, you live in a failed state.
Are you talking about the cost of digitising? Or the cost of keeping paper records?
Because there's more to this than simply how expensive is the format that we keep them in. There's also how quick and easy it is to produce, to search, to share, to update. These are all positives when information is digitised that can't be done if your will is a piece of paper forgotton underneath your bed.
The cost of keeping paper records. Doing anything but keeping them is crackhead behavior, it's like ripping copper pipes out of your walls and selling them to keep your electricity turned on. A society has failed if it reaches that point. I agree there's more to it than expense, such as having a secured original that's much more difficult to forge.
I'm sorry but this wildly over simplifying the issue to the point that the copper pipe analogy and hyperbolic language isn't useful. I respectfully hard disagree with this characterisation for the reasons I've explained in my other reply.
Putting a will (or anything other legal documents) on paper must have seemed totally natural hundreds of years ago but at some point we need to accept that we have different needs for these documents and different ways of capturing them.
I totally agree with you about security. That should be a principle in all of this. But that shouldn't constrain us to recording on paper. If security is paramount then design a system whereby you can verify the veracity and authenticity of the digital document and create secured controls around their handling - hint these systems already exist today. Tampering and theft is certainly an issue but realistically so is it if you still had paper. It's not uncommon for paper to burn, I have been told 😉.
Any system is fallible, but that shouldn't mean we remove it from consideration.
If you're going to argue with me, spend less time on smug pontification and more time making sure you actually know what my point is.
I'm not trying to argue with you 😔. I'm trying to have a conversation with you. There's no need to be like that.
So you're saying that governments should waste tax payer money on something that has no real benefit just because it can?
I guess you also want to keep them longer than 150 years?;I mean it would be crack head behaviour to throw them out right? Why not convert the whole country to warehouses and store every document ever made?
They're just old legal documents, interesting to have a copy for future generations but in no way worth the huge waste of money storing them would be.
Stopped reading there.
No. I'm saying what was in my comment. The right interpretation for what I say is the one I already gave you.
That money can be put to better use though, no?
Why? Better in what sense? Better for whom? I think spending the money on ensuring that paper records are preserved is worth it solely because it monkeywrenches tampering and fraud, so diverting that money would always be worse no matter what it goes to. Money spent on maintaining public parks would be better spent on curing cancer, does that mean we defund parks? Money spent on a necessity is not a waste just because there are other necessities.
Also, even assuming you're right, who cares? I just spent $1.50 on a cup of coffee. That money could have been put to better use, but it wasn't, and it doesn't matter, because it's $1.50. This was my original point, functional states don't have to even think about this cost, they can literally afford to forget it.
Yeah, I hear you and I'm not averse to spending money on things that don't bring "direct" value. I fully believe that historical documents are important.
What I'm weighing it against is this: Governments have a fixed annual budget. It's costing 4.5M a year to keep those documents. As the number of historical wills increases over time, so will the cost so there has to be some kind of cutoff point. Given that fixed budget (for example) how many homeless people could be housed versus the downside of having the documents stored in digital format (and it is a downside compared to having the original). I'm only talking about ones for people long since dead btw.
When you have a fixed budget, every penny you spend has an opportunity cost.
And of course I acknowledge that the budget could be increased in ways that allow for the originals to be saved while taxing the ultra rich more to pay for it. The current UK government is unfortunately not going to do that.
Academics have already run those numbers. It's already a decided issue among those who will actually do the preservation what the preferred method is, for which purposes. And no one is saying you can't have multiple purposes or preserve multiple formats, (in fact, that, too, is preferred) except those arguing cost, who, like they do with climate change, want to ignore established science as well as what those actual costs will be.
I cannot stress this enough, that is nothing. You're hand-wringing over an amount of money that falls under the scope of a rounding error in any first-world country's budget. If you want to talk about proper use of resources, a properly-functioning legislative body shouldn't even be able to afford to think about it, let alone discuss it, they should be dealing with a full session's-worth of projects that cost 100—100,000 times as much. If you want to talk about proper use of the taxpayers' money, it doesn't involve elected officials derelicting their actual duties to hem and haw over something that costs under $50 million on the national scale. For a government to have taken any action on this at all is a greater wastage than any potential savings. Seriously, imagine being paid by the public to ensure things are run properly, and then spending your time on the clock discussing whether or not the government should save $4.5M per year by switching brands of floor wax in all of the public schools. People have been tarred and feathered for less.
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.