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by zeta0134 2969 days ago
This is even more fun because in the modern age, what very often ends up happening is:

electronic charts -> pdf -> fax -> fax machine as a service -> unsecured email -> pdf -> electronic charts

Compliance can sometimes help, but ultimately the data needs to flow, and people will do whatever it takes to make that happen. Until security is so easy that it's the default, these little loopholes will continue to be abused.

2 comments

Phaxio co-founder here. We do a _ton_ of heathcare faxing and we're starting to see a shift away from the "unsecure email" in applications. Granted, we can't see what our users are doing at all times but being HIPAA compliant ourselves, we often work with our users to understand their systems and guide them towards compliance.

>> Until security is so easy that it's the default, these little loopholes will continue to be abused.

The simple way to think about this is that the government is more worried about unsecure email/email spoofing than it is about wiretapping.

To be fair, you’ll notice if 150 million faxes start going off rather than someone breaking abusing your API.