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"The current system works well enough" is a poor justification to avoid technological progress. I imagine people said the same thing about automobiles during t
by beambot 3y ago
"The current system works well enough" is a poor justification to avoid technological progress. I imagine people said the same thing about automobiles during the era of horses & buggies... yet here we are.
A much better argument is the indelible nature of physical signatures. But even that factor has pluses & minuses in an increasingly-digital world. If anything, we need digital signatures - e.g. to watermark original images, videos, articles, etc in an era of deepfakes.
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoOn the contrary, "Progress" is a poor justification for complexity. To justify change, especially change that adds complexity and cost, there needs to be a problem that needs solving or an opportunity to make things better, where better means "cheaper" or "easier" or "simpler" or "fails less." Progress that doesn't make things better for somebody isn't progress, it's Juicero. If there isn't any notarization fraud out there causing expensive problems, then spending a bunch of effort to make notarizations better isn't solving any problems but is adding complexity and cost.
- beambot 3y agoManaging electronic signatures (e.g. DocuSign & file storage) is a 10x improvement for me compared to printing, signing, mailing or faxing, and file cabinets. The complexity & reduced costs are definitely worth it. YMMV.
- necovek 3y agoDocuSign is a very weak signing system: signatures it produces are forgeable by anyone getting even a temporary access to an email (eg sitting on an unlocked computer or grabbing an unlocked phone), and the graphical part is something anyone can't replicate twice, unless you use one of their fonts making it even more easily forgeable. I don't even remember seeing an option to say that a particular email should always use a specific form (eg drawing of a signature). Basically, compared to hand-written signatures, they are strictly less secure and a demonstration of how technology makes forgery easier. Would you like it if your bank accepted transfer orders through DocuSign?
- Foobar8568 3y agoBecause you believe that a wet paper signature is actually better or even verified? And you have multiple levels of requirements in e-signature.
- necovek 3y agoThere are strong electronic signatures which are as safe as a signature can be: iow, a question of who generated the key (an issue with keys provided by official cert authorities) and how is it kept safe at rest (basically, how much care a user takes of them). DocuSign is, in general, neither of these. I am sure there are less convenient options with DocuSign than the email based one, but I've only ever been asked to "sign" by attempting to draw my signature using a mouse or their own font. I'd rather have someone attempt to forge my handwriting which experts can usually detect, and which requires a bit more sophistication: my concern is not about them being validated, but that instead if I claim how that's not my signature, I can easily provide a bunch of past signatures to an expert to prove my point. There are free software and free hardware tokens which can generate secure certificates to use for encryption or signing. I would probably trust those best.
- prepend 3y agoI just sign the pdf with preview and save it off to a folder. Works great.
- prepend 3y agoTechnology should be weighing the benefit against the cost. It’s not that techno-notaries wouldn’t have benefits, it’s that they wouldn’t have much benefit over the current system. Also, digital notaries aren’t required to do things like signing images or even documents or commits or whatever. I would just hate if all my documents requiring a notary suddenly required enotaries.