On Feb 2, 2015, at 12:32 PM, Josh Smift <[email protected]> wrote:

> I imagine that the signature was originally for non-repudiation: If you go
> to a store and say "hey I didn't buy that", and they say "well, here's a
> receipt with your signature on it", that makes it a lot harder for you to
> prove that you didn't.
> 
> Does anyone who's worked in the payment processing industry have a sense
> of how often the presence of a signature is actually used to prove (or
> disprove) anything? I'd sort of assumed that these days it's just security
> theater.

NPR's Planet Money covered some of the history of signatures last year. They 
concluded that mostly they aren't used for proof these days. Listen to the 
audio in the second link for people who make drawings in the signature box.

 
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/09/08/345820789/why-do-we-sign-for-things-a-rabbi-a-lawyer-and-a-mastercard-exec-explain
 http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/08/29/344034815/episode-564-the-signature

-- 
Robert Au
[email protected]



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