The Gripe Line looks into Pixily.com, a service that scans and stores your paper and digital documents online Thomas wrote to me about a service — Pixily.com — that stores paper and digital documents online. “I need this service,” he says. “I could ship off all these important papers littering my office and be able to locate them later — from any computer — via a keyword search. I’m no good at filing. And even if I was, I travel so much that I’m never near my file cabinet. But is this safe? Assuming the company is legit, what if they outsource the scanning and OCRing to a prison or some other unknown entity?” I need this service too. I do everything I can to go digital, but paper still accumulates. And I sometimes tear pages out of magazines, but I have no system for retrieving that sort of information when I need it. But I have the same concerns Thomas expressed. So I called Pixily to see if that would clear them up. I dialed the customer service line, and Anand Rajaram, one of the company’s founders and its chief product officer, picked up the line. He explained that each member of the management team takes turns answering support calls so that they can hear what customers are saying. He also assured me that every step of the Pixily process is designed with security in mind. Pixily is a fairly new startup — it came out of a private beta in July. “And right now, with our current volumes, when you send us documents in our prepaid envelopes, we return them the same day.” (You will have to shred or recycle your documents yourself for now, but the service plans to offer secure recycling in the future.) Once at Pixily.com, your papers will be prepped for scanning by one of Pixily’s employees. “We do a little document preparation, but our scanners require only minimal paper handling. If you send credit card receipts, a long credit card statement, and a magazine clipping, those can all go in the same batch.” And Rajaram assured me your paper is handled only by Pixily.com employees. “If you work in the payroll department at a bank or with public money,” explained Rajaram, “there are background checks you have to go through. All of our scanner operators have gone through those same background checks.” Rajaram went on to reveal that once the documents are scanned, they proceed to a secure Amazon data services server. “We thought a lot of security,” he says. “For example, we stayed away from using a PDF-type plug-in viewer on our Web site because those download files to your computer. Our viewer leaves no trail on your computer in case you want to browse your documents from a public computer.” What do you think? Should Thomas and I safely clean our offices this way? Technology Industry