On Mon, 2 Feb 2015, Robert Au wrote:
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.
well, a why shouldn't a drawing be a valid signature? If you think back to the
days before literacy was common, even people who couldn't read or write would
'make their mark' on legal documents.
for that matter, some people's signature is not something you are ever going to
be able to read. They may as well be abstract art :-)
David Lang
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