the one benefit i see is as a final “lock in your answer” function for any form you’re submitting.
And did they have to stop allowing written signatures because of AI scraping? Or is it just because they never looked legible at all?
I was at a grocery store back when you had to sign the little digital screen for a card transaction and I finished signing, but the cashier got distracted and didn’t accept the signature for a while, so I just doodled Godzilla trashing a skyscraper next to my name.
My best friend was there with me and from that day forward, I’m not sure if he’s ever signed something without adding a Batman logo.
Signatures are arbitrary.
That would be precisely an example of how signatures are not arbitrary, but rather marked in our own unique quirks.
“This guy drew a batman symbol on his signature!” “Oh yeah, EvilBit’s friend always does that. That means you’ve got the real deal”
Except that you can draw whatever you want and it can be different each time in theory. Some may enforce consistency, but there’s no legal requirement of it.
The actual shape of your signature hasn’t really meant much for some time. As recently as 2005, Visa’s contract had the most bizarre requirements.
You are supposed to sign the back of your card. If you paid with the card, you had to sign the receipt. The cashier was supposed to examine the signature on the card and the signature on the receipt and decide if they matched.
But. If the card was not signed, the cashier was supposed to insist that the person present sign the card, and then the cashier was supposed to compare the signatures right there. We were also forbidden by contract from asking for ID.
I think a digital signature is also a way they can prosecute for impersonating someone for identity theft. By you typing and saying “this is me” if it’s not, they can use that as evidence.
It does as much as does “testifying under oath” does to magically stop you from lying.
i.e., putting your hand on a significant bit of text and saying some special words doesn’t stop you from lying, but it DOES create / enhance penalties if you do.
I scanned the responses, and didn’t see anyone who mentioned this.
The point at which the U.S. allowed you to “sign” your name by typing was when the E-Sign Act was passed. That was in 2000, long before LLMs were really a concern.
The reason was to make online commerce easier. Verbal contacts could and continue to be enforced, but enforcement requires more effort than with a written contact.
At the time I thought the law was passed by people who didn’t understand technology and how easy this made it for people to commit fraud or screw over consumers. However now I realize they just didn’t give a fuck.
physical signatures are just asking you to write your name in a box…
Not a huge difference.
No I disagree, the idea with physical signatures is that you write it in cursive, so in theory nobody will do ot exactly the same way as you write it - but then people can forge things, and since people don’t actually write their name the exact same way every time, forgery is essentially as good as perfect.
Edit to fix typo and add italics.
And, most young adults don’t sign in cursive anymore, so, aside from terrible handwriting, their printed name isn’t really much different than a typed name.
You might disagree, but that doesn’t mean you’re right. A signature does not require cursive. It doesn’t even have to be legible. It’s a mark that you make signifying that you agree to whatever it is you’re signing.
https://thelegalguide.org/understanding-signatures-legal-definitions-validity/
Signatures have never required cursive. Historically, people who couldn’t read or write would just put an X in the signature spot and that was valid. Yeah, there is a marginal benefit to physically signing something in cursive, but the purpose of signing it has always been more of a final agreement step.
If handwriting and spelling and how I signed it actually mattered at all legally, then I could sign a different name when I buy a car, get keys, drive away, and later in court, say “well I never agreed to pay for this car, look at my signature, it says Frank Sinatra”. Same goes for a true forgery. The evidence I didn’t sign it myself is my statement in court saying “I didn’t sign this”, and whatever signs there are that I didn’t benefit from this.
Nobody has relied only on signatures to verify that a person signed it, since forever. Especially because forgery was always a thing.
This is why documents that are important aren’t just signed by one person; they’re signed by witnesses who presumably will vouch for it. (Like notary public’s are a thing.)
For lesser contracts they first verify you are in fact you.
There’s no functional difference online- to within a reasonable standard.
“in cursive”
Laughs in years of deviating but programmed hand movements from which letters are rarely decipherable…
IMO, that’s not a digital signature. That’s a normal signature on a computer. Digital signatures involve cryptography. For example, OpenPGP.
Signature matching/analysis isn’t particularly scientific, so in general a physical signature is used for clear authorization, not identification. When you log in to something to sign your identity is already set by other means, so all the signature needs to do is say “yes, I agree to this”. E signatures in the US were legally formalized awhile ago, so it’s not really a controversy.
I think that’s probably it, or pure cargo cult because “we’ve always had signatures so something’s got to go in that slot”. The whole idea of random scrawls for “authentication” has been weird all along. As if everyone walked around knowing what everyone’s signatures should look like. And if you do know, you can just… write it that way.
(Plenty of countries just have digital “signing” that’s a bit more like something sane, a central authentication thing based on your ID number and 2FA.)
