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Comment by codazoda | Hacker News Reader

Email, mail, or fax a PDF form. Nice. /s

If it was only fax or snail mail only I'd be more outraged. The hassle associated with email is roughly symmetric. In other words, the hassle you having to fill out a form and attach it in a email is roughly equal to the hassle of equifax having to hire someone to manually process the emails. This is as opposed to something like fax/mail which is much more of a hassle for the average consumer (digging up a fax machine, or having to print something off and buying stamps/envelopes) than equifax (getting the mail delivered to their doorstep). Having an email rather than a web form was probably because they figured there wouldn't be enough request to justify building a CRUD app to manage it.

Snail mail can be a hassle, but on the flip side, with snail mail, you can send in the request via certified mail with a requested return receipt. This creates a legal record of when they received your request. Thus, if they don't act on it in a timely fashion, you can prove it. It is only tangentially related, but in Patio11's article on handling bogus entries on one's credit report[1], there's this wonderful line: 'I was sending “certified mail, return receipt requested”, which is Dangerous Professional for “Do you like paper trails? I like paper trails. I particularly like paper trails where the United States Federal Government attests to the exact minute your firm learned the contents of this letter.”' While not quite the same situation, I suspect such admissible-in-court-as-evidence[2] traceability of communication is of equal use here.

1. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...

2. This is my intuition talking here -- I am not a lawyer. If you have legal questions, talk to one. But, IMO it would be utterly bizarre if USPS record of when a specific piece of mail was received were not admissible as proof of claiming that company got your request.

Technically speaking you can assume that any business receives a mail unless specifically refuted by evidence, but lawyers like having the extra oomph that comes from demonstrating receipt.

> Technically speaking you can assume that any business receives a mail unless specifically refuted by evidence

PRETRIAL:

Sender (in a sworn pre-trial affidavit): I mailed this letter.

Addressee (ditto): I never got it.

Judge: We now have sworn evidence to controvert the Mailbox Rule (which establishes a presumption of delivery after mailing). That means I'm not allowed to rule summarily on that question. That in turn means we have to let the jury decide whether the letter was received.

To quote one of my former students: That's a conversation I don't want to have, because of what follows:

TRIAL:

Sender (under oath): I mailed the letter.

Addressee (ditto): I never got it.

JURY DELIBERATIONS:

Juror N (during deliberation): I believed Sender but I also believed Addressee.

Juror N+1 (ditto): I didn't believe Addressee.

Juror N+2 (ditto): I didn't believe Sender and I did believe Addressee.

VERDICT:

Now it's a roll of the dice as to what the jury concludes about whether the letter was actually received.

LESSON:

Use certified mail or other service that will provide independent confirmation of receipt, refusal, or reasonable efforts to deliver. (The Three R's of Notice.)

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