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?
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.
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.
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/
Could be a jurisdiction thing. Non-cursive signatures* get rejected in my country if the recipient bothers to check.
( * If written in the Latin alphabet.)
Fair - the idea with a signature is that you ideally write it in cursive, unless you have a seal or stamp to hand? Depending on what the document asks, and most will ask a written signature.
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.
most young adults don’t sign in cursive anymore
That seems like a terrible idea. I’m disappointed in humans yet again.
Meh. After hearing years of complaints from old people about how terrible young people are, and working with a lot of young people who are objectively much better people than the old ones that complain about them, I always try to stop to think about why traditions are valuable.
Does writing your words with extra loopy bits that are less legible than print REALLY make you a better person?
Not learning cursive is like not learning Latin. Maybe it was useful at some point, but the only reason to push for it now, is because “That’s how I did it, so it must be the best way, and everyone else is wrong!”
I think there’s validity in learning/teaching cursive, if you’re proficient it’s a much faster way of writing. Handwritten notetaking has been shown to be more effective than digital in terms of concept retention (you’re not just regurgitating content verbatim), and cursive can facilitate better notetaking. I’d argue its setting students up for better outcomes in secondary and post-secondary institutions.
Regardless of that I do agree with your view, we should not just continue things for the sake of tradition, young people aren’t “terrible” for forsaking certain traditions. If anything, re-evaluating what we hold as important is a useful exercise, especially when it comes to education.
Wouldn’t shorthand (stenography) be a better solution then?
Cursive was very specifically a solution to quill/fountain pens of old, where you needed to reduce the times the pen touched the paper.
not learning cursive is like not learning Latin
I think both are still useful today, cursive less so. But sure, they’re not indicative of superior moral fibre, which is presumably why you prefer young people to old people.
To put a finer point on it, it’s not even just “moral fibre”. Sure, higher societal morality is something we should all strive for, but I’m not even asking for that much.
It’s the morally neutral bullshit like handwriting, or reading a novel on your phone instead of on paper, or spending your free time playing video games or watching YouTube/Twitch as opposed to watching Network television. There’s no reason to raise a fuss or dub others inferior for doing things a little different.
I’m not raising a fuss, but signing in detachéd does make it way easier for others to forge your signature and even makes it less difficult to replicate your own signature. Knowing how to write cursive costs nothing, so not practicing it - at least for signatures - seems terrible.
It lets you sign off greeting cards (more effectively)
It leads to faster note taking (though generally less neat notes, lol)
Why? Everyone’s handwriting is different and unique whether it’s cursive or regular script.
Difference is more pronounced in cursive, I strongly believe. I look at a lot of regular script handwriting and it looks the same as another person’s, you’d have to get out a magnifying glass or microscope to see the subtleties.
Now that I say that though I think a lot of handwriting manages to look the same when people strive for the same ideal of neatness.
How’s your cuneiform? Do you know how to use a quill pen? Do you know how to bleach a peace of expensive parchment so that it can be reused?
How’s your cuneiform
Yeaaaaah wtf are you talking about lad. That is an alphabet, i.e of a foreign language, not the act of being able to write my own name in cursive in my native Latin script.
Do you know how to use a quill pen?
Yes. Why do you not know how to?
Do you know how to bleach a peace of expensive parchment so that it can be reused?
I could probably figure out how to bleach a piece of parchment in order to re-use it, but have never had to.
Have a nice day.
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.
Where I come from the X thing wouldn’t be legally binding. What people who couldn’t read or write would do is using their fingerprints. They would put their finger on a stamp ink pad and then stamp the paper with their finger. That’s why we say “someone who uses their fingerprint” as a euphemism for “illiterate”.
That’s really interesting and a great way to do that, honestly. A singular fingerprint also makes more sense than needing handwriting analysis to detect a forgery, too. Kinda feel that should be the norm everywhere, honestly, a signing and a print next to it to verify against if the need arises.
P.S. Sorry for the rant you can ignore this post. I’m just frustrated with the bureaucracy here.
I mean sure but these bureaucratic laws and practices are ancient. I come from Egypt and the bureaucracy here is terrible. To do anything government related you have you to free an entire day and some times almost a week from your schedule just to finish the paperwork and visit the required government offices. Why is that still necessary in the digital age.
When our government decided to digitise they didn’t upgrade their system they just added additional digital steps. So now the process has even more redundant steps. The issue is that the rules are too old and the system is too centralised and also fragmented. To get a single paper/request approved you usually have to go through multiple departments, offices and ministries each with their own rules, requirements and paperwork, while we have the infrastructure to just do it with a single paper, an ID and a biometric scanner and share the info between departments digitally. Also a system this complex has to have many loopholes and bound for corruption.
The argument I keep hearing for bureaucracy is that the government has to keep providing government jobs to reduce unemployment since a significant portion work in the public sector, but these jobs are useless anyway we can give some of them actually useful tasks and with the saved money we can put it to better the welfare system. Another argument is that you have pay multiple fees, but then you can also take these fees as a single summed transaction and save the time.
In parts of the world, paperwork is managed with stamps and a mark. Your doctor in latin america will stamp a blank prescription pad with a stamp that has their name and license number. They will then make a recognizable mark over the stamp. Same with your lawyer and all government offices. The point isn’t that someone can use handwriting analysis - which is just fluff - and rather that they possess the stamp and those who would read the paperwork recognize their particular mark.
“in cursive”
Laughs in years of deviating but programmed hand movements from which letters are rarely decipherable…
Which can, in all fairness, be a benefit of it. Because you might want to write something that people can’t immediately read - notes to yourself, notes in class, a passed note to someone else.
I’m not going to claim I’m happy about having “cursive for handwriting” drilled into me and being forced to learn it, but I do think it’s helpful to know for signatures or when it’s fancy writing time. There’s not really a benefit to not knowing about particular thing/skill… almost ever. It’s like the most low effort skill, and all muscle memory.___
Sorry that’s not right. You can see my other comment about the ESIGN Act here: https://lemmy.world/comment/25214883
Note: it also points out how the top response is just… well, wrong.
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 point of the signature isn’t the mark, but that the affirmation on the document can reasonably be tied to you. For most of history, it has been tied to a certain mark, whether it be a signed name, a stamp or embossed seal, or even a drawing. That system generally breaks down in the digital age.
A low hanging fruit that is seen to work is having the mark of approval get tied to an account under the control of the signee. It isn’t so much that you made the mark but that it is tied to an email address you control. So even if you don’t sign it with an actual signature, it still gets tied to you.
It almost feels like I’m just trolling everyone by pushing back now, but:
The point of the signature isn’t the mark, but that the affirmation on the document can reasonably be tied to you. For most of history, it has been tied to a certain mark, whether it be a signed name, a stamp or embossed seal, or even a drawing. That system generally breaks down in the digital age.
In the context of only-physical documents, is that affirmation not helped by having certain marks and/or styles of signing that are typical of your own signing? Thus the specific mark contributes to the affirmation.
For a physical only document, the mark is something relatively difficult for others to perform. Even then, signatures by themselves usually only carry a certain amount of weight by themselves; either the risk of borne by the other party or additional measures are taken like requiring witnesses including notaries.
To answer the next question you’ll probably ask, it is considered to be far more trivial for someone to apply someone else’s mark digitally than it is in person. Anyone with a pdf editor can apply someone else’s signature to a document without their knowledge.
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 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.
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.
Neat
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 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.)
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.
It was like this further back than 2005. I worked retail in the mid 90s and it was the same. And if the signatures didn’t match, well. Oh well. We had no power to do anything about it. The number of self-righteous idiots I had who thought that they were clever when they would sign their cards as Mikey mouse and then freak the hell out when I never bothered to check because it didn’t matter if it was signed Mickey Mouse or Ronald Reagan and you signed the receipt with your actual name. We couldn’t do anything! God they’d get so mad. Thank god we had great management that would back us.
IMO, that’s not a digital signature. That’s a normal signature on a computer. Digital signatures involve cryptography. For example, OpenPGP.
The digital signature is things you don’t see. The visual signature is more for ceremony as it’s referring to our past to smooth the transition
You might be confusing this with a browser fingerprint. There isn’t a magic ghost signature that appears in the data when you consent to sign by typing your name in to a box. It’s really just the box.
Your signature can be whatever you want to sign. I sign different things all the time. The legality is just in you consenting and making your mark.
Your signature looks different every time you sign it, and it being an exact replica was a way to spot a forgery. A signature has never been some sort of security feature.
Proper digital signatures are very secure and prove that you have possession of the signing key and that the document has not been modified since. Unfortunately those keys are very expensive (unless your employer gets them for you), so usually when people sign something in Acrobat or whatever it will just use a self-signed certificate at best. This does still prove that the document hasn’t been modified since it was signed, but it doesn’t prove anything about who signed it.
