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Why do people still use fax machines?

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provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons license.The fax machine is a symbol of long superseded by computer networks – but faxing is actually growing in popularity.Four years ago, I wrote a , saying my book covered “the rise and fall of the fax machine.” The end I predicted has not yet come: Millions of people, businesses and community groups send millions of faxed pages every day, from standalone fax machines, multifunction printers and computer-based fax services. It turns out that in many cases, faxing is more secure, easier to use and better suited to existing work habits than computer-based messaging.Faxing remains alive and well, especially in and – and in major sectors of the U.S. economy, such as health care and financial services. Countless emails flash back and forth, but millions of faxes travel the world daily too.A worldwide survey in 2017 found that of 200 large firms, defined as companies with more than 500 employees, had seen workers send the same number of, or even more, faxes that year than in 2016. A March 2017 unscientific survey of 1,513 members of an online forum for information technology professionals found that .The persistence of faxing – and the people who send faxes – is in part because the fax industry has adapted to accommodate new technologies. Fax machines still dominate, but both surveys suggested users were shifting to computer-based services, such as fax servers that let users send and receive faxes as electronic documents. Cloud-based fax services, which treat faxes as images or PDF files attached to emails, are also becoming more popular. These new systems can transmit faxes over telephone lines or the internet, depending on the recipient, handling paper and electronic documents equally easily.Fax’s longevity also benefits greatly from reluctance – both legal and social – to accept email as secure and an emailed electronic signature as valid. Faxed signatures became legally accepted in the late 1980s and early 1990s in a series of legal and administrative decisions by state and federal agencies. The in 2000 also gave digital signatures legal power but institutional and individual acceptance followed only slowly – if at all.Even parts of the federal government preferred faxes over email for many years thereafter. Not until 2010 did the Drug Enforcement Agency allow 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 allows faxing from physical fax machines without encrypting the message, but demands encryption for all email and internet communications, including cloud-based faxing. It’s much .Another reason faxing hangs on is because competing technologies are weak. The health care industry generates huge amounts of data for each patient. That should make it fertile ground for a fully digital record-keeping system, “ between patient, provider, caregivers, researchers, innovators and payers,” as Seema Verna, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, put it in a speech earlier this year.Federal privacy laws and deliberately incompatible standards, however, stand in the way. Immediately after the passage of the 1996 , fax vendors retooled their transmission, reception and storage systems and procedures to protect patients’ personal records. 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 .The Obama administration spent more than US$25 billion . 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.What actually happened was that competing companies . Doctors’ offices and hospitals that use different records databases digitally – but they can via fax. For many medical professionals, , faxing is far easier than dealing with expensive, hard-to-use software that doesn’t actually do what it was supposed to: securely share patient information.One more personal factor preserving faxing is users’ . Small businesses who find that faxing meets all their needs have little reason to spend the money and effort to try a new technology for document exchange. Every company that prefers faxes inherently encourages all its customers and suppliers to keep faxing too, to avoid messing up existing ordering processes.It’s important to remember, too, that fax machines and multifunctional printers with a fax capability provide an inexpensive backup capability in case of technical problems with an internet connection, or even a cyberattack, like the Russian attack on .Absent a compelling reason or some management or government mandate, . This is true beyond faxing: I drive a 2005 Camry. There are plenty of cars that are better in some way – safer, more fuel-efficient, more comfortable – but so long as the Camry passes state inspections and performs adequately, I can avoid the challenges and costs of buying a new car and learning how to use its new features.Faxing is still popular overseas, too. In Britain, the encouraged but did not explicitly authorize electronic signatures. In 2018, urged partly by the , the concluded that electronic signatures were indeed legal but needed significant promotion to increase their acceptance and use.Not surprisingly, a recent survey found that Britain’s National Health Service operated . In response, the U.K.‘s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock labeled faxing and pledged to introduce new technologies more quickly. In December, the to stop buying fax machines in 2019 and end their use by the end of 2020. That’s the same goal the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Verna has for to stop faxing.Nevertheless, faxing continues because it remains better – cheaper, more convenient, more secure, more comfortable – than the alternatives for many people, businesses and organizations. Faxing will remain important until transmitting digital data becomes easier and more accepted. That could be a long way off, though. are trying to make , but no one has yet been hired to take a .Eventually the older generation of people more comfortable with faxing than emailing will fade away. Until then, however, fax machines will whirl away.Write an article and join a growing community of more than 79,300 academics and researchers from 2,714 institutions.CommunityCompanyStay informed and subscribe to our free daily newsletter and get the latest analysis and commentary directly in your inbox.Follow us on social media

provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons license.The fax machine is a symbol of long superseded by computer networks – but faxing is actually growing in popularity.Four years ago, I wrote a , saying my book covered “the rise and fall of the fax machine.” The end I predicted has not yet come: Millions of people, businesses and community groups send millions of faxed pages every day, from standalone fax machines, multifunction printers and computer-based fax services. It turns out that in many...

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Jonathan Coopersmith

The Conversation is a network of not-for-profit media outlets that publish news stories on the Internet that are written by academics and researchers, under a free Creative Commons licence, allowing reuse but only without modification. It first launched in Australia in March 2011, and has expanded into editions in the United Kingdom in 2013, United States in 2014, Africa and France in 2015, Canada in 2017, Indonesia in 2017, and Spain in 2018. In September 2019, The Conversation reported a monthly online audience of 10.7 million users onsite, and a combined reach of 40 million people including republication.

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