294
UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
294 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
59111 readers
3256 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.