You Do Know That DocuSign Is Not Really Digital Signing …

You Do Know That DocuSign Is Not Really Digital Signing …

And so the world is changing. The whole concept of me signing with my wet signature is going. But we are still struggling to release ourselves from the almost completely untrustworthy scribble. So, while digital signatures have little in the way of legal standing, we have ended up with two almost completely untrusted worthy ways of signing something.

The first crazy way is to copy and paste your signature into a document (ha-ha!), and then produce a PDF of it, and send it off:

Here’s a bit of fun with signatures:

And some people even put their signatures into Web pages [here]:

Honestly, who puts their signature on-line? Oh wait, someone tweeted this (doh!):

So, in this time of lockdown, it is difficult to get documents signed with a wet signature, so what have many turned to? DocuSign:

Basically, slightly more trustworthy than the copy-and-paste method of adding a signature, but it is basically still the old way, but with a click button for a signature that you could never replicate. You just select a default signature and click a button and you’re away:

This is really just the same copy-and-paste method as before, but replacing the need for you to actually scan something that is real. I think this has ZERO credibility and could be easily contested. In fact, I’ve given evidence on a few occasions on this, and asked the company who generated the document for the user to sign, if they had logs of the IP addressed, the telephone correspondence record, and so on. The silence was noticeable.

So, for us, we need to look towards proper digital signing with your private key and prove from your public key. Within a Hyperledger infrastructure, this method proves the core foundation level, and where everything is properly digitally signed with keys. We need to move to a world which is more trustworthy, otherwise, it’s the same old analogue world that we’ve had for hundreds of years. In fact, please governments, we need proper digital identities for our citizens — and not ones to spy on them.

Here is a paper that I am very proud of — and fundamentally written to cover many aspects of building a new trusted world: [here]:

The great thing is that this paper, it that is was written based on the work of three PhD students coming together to fuse their ideas (and the result of them winning a hackathon prize in Berlin). Basically the paper outlines what the Blockpass ID Lab is all about … building a more trusted digital world, and which puts the citizen — and their rights to privacy — at the core. Please, governments of the world, learn something from this current world and rebuild a new world for your citizens. As long as I still get a letter in the post from my council saying “Dear Resident”, I will know I existing in an old world.