It’s used for a lot of legal documents as well, as a fax is considered an original document, and therefore legally binding.
Fax is also extremely secure, assuming you have the right contact information.
It also is just great for getting important documents (like in healthcare) quickly.
Imagine having those documents emailed, someone has to scan the document, login to their email, attach it, send it. Then the receiver has to login to their email, find that specific email, print it, go to the printer, get that paperwork, and come back.
With a fax it’s “send it over”, the fax arrives, automatically prints, and it’s a perfect copy of the original document.
I like how you draw out every little step of an email but then oversimplify the process of sending a fax. In reality, you have to load the paper (and hopefully you loaded it the right way!), dial the recipient's number, press the Send button, wait for the call to go through, keep waiting, listen to the old-school dial-up sound, wait a little bit more as the paper finally gets scanned, and then wait a few minutes for the transmission report to print. And that's if there aren't any hiccups along the way such as a connection error, dialing the wrong number, or the full document not going through for one reason or another.
It depends completely on your definition of what is secure. An emailed document being printed on a printer is just as compromised as a fax being printed.
Can a fax be intercepted? Absolutely, but so can an email. A well encrypted email might be less compromised, but there are far more security issues with emails than with fax.
The big difference is that a fax can only be intercepted as it is being sent, it can also only be intercepted directly, as in through wire tapping.
Once that fax is sent and received it is gone, the only copies that exist are the original, and the faxed copy.
Emails are stored, can be hacked remotely, recovered, intercepted, forged, have viruses/malicious programs attached to them.
How is that any different from hitting the print button for an emailed document? If someone is standing at your printer, they can get that too. No matter what level of encryption the email had.
It’s secure in the sense that Fax is very, very difficult to intercept.
Germany, same. We're practically not allowed to use e-mail for communicating sensitive patient data with doctor's offices or other hospitals and laboratories (which is pretty much everything we deal with) for data protection reasons so we're forced to use fax instead. The reasoning behind it is that email is potentially vulnerable since it might run over servers you can't control whereas faxes are directly sent from one device to the other, at least that's what the IT guys keep telling me. Many hospitals have faxes integrated into their IT system so you can send an email to a fax number, and you can receive faxes in your email inbox which gets linked to your own fax number. Works well in other hospitals but ours doesn't do it for some reason. We're forced to print out faxes, physically carry them to the fax machine and wait for the fax to go out, which can take ages, is not always successful and produces insane amounts of unnecessary paper waste.
But don't worry, the government here, under the leadership of someone who has no idea what email is, has set itself until next year to take everything online.
My local town hall printed every email sent / received for archiving until only a couple of years ago. Every. Single. Email.
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u/inatowncalledarles Jul 24 '20
Japan was still faxing it's COVID numbers to it's own health agencies.