Why it’s time to sign off on the signature
Here’s a question that’s been bugging me a long time: why do we still require signatures on documents and forms? Over the years I’ve looked into the matter, hoping to find that we’ve come up with a solution, but still no joy.
With most education systems around the world having stopped the teaching of handwriting beyond what is required to simply write functionally, and after a pandemic that has rendered script with a pen as redundant as paper, growing numbers of parents are finding that their children, when asked to sign a document, are practically incapable of doing more than writing their name in capital letters or producing a random squiggle. But to be fair, little blame can be laid at the door of a generation unable to understand the point of something as antiquated as a signature.
Let’s be honest; the signature is a throwback that can now be captured and reproduced on any document in an instant. Whenever I am asked for a signed document for something by e-mail, someone other than me takes a digitized signature from a file, stamps it on the document and sends it, in many cases without my knowledge. In other words, any of the sites to which these contracts are sent could, theoretically and very easily, extract my signature from that document and use it to sign others.
