We’re signing away our privacy along with our personality

The handwritten signature is a deeply personal thing, often influenced by the signatures of our parents. A typed name is not the same

Farewell, then, to the handwritten signature. Cheques have fallen from fashion, couriers require barely a squiggle on their devices when you accept a delivery, and now the Law Commission has decided that electronic signatures – which can simply entail typing your name or clicking “I accept” on a website

– can be treated as equivalent to written ones for certain types of contract. We’re still required to sign the back of bank cards, but with people now increasingly paying with their smartphones, even that will presumably soon look old-fashioned.

We may quickly regret such “progress”. The proponents of electronic identity blind us with claims of convenience. Yes, it is certainly more efficient to access banking services via fingerprint recognition, to speed through passport control with a biometric passport that uses data stored about the contours of your face and to express consent quickly and efficiently online by clicking a button. It is a pain to have to sign a piece of paper, scan it into a computer, and then dispatch it via email.

But convenience at what cost? E-signatures, as the Law Commission admitted in its consultation, raise fears about security. How can one be confident that a document has been electronically signed by the person who should be signing it, and not another person?

It proposes a variety of solutions, including witnessing via webcam or videolink, but what if even this isn’t enough? There are already services that check electronic signatures against biometric data, including fingerprints. Other technologies require the individual to write the signature on a screen or a special pad and then record how it is drawn. Will the proliferation of e-signatures also require the storage of yet more personal information on corporate or government databases? It’s a long way from “my word is my bond”, and potentially a dramatic loss of privacy.

Perhaps these fears can be allayed, and technologists who are mindful of popular concerns about privacy are creating secure ways of proving identity and expressing consent online. But there are two further objections to subsuming ourselves yet further into such online processes and systems.

The first is control. The process of marking your name on a document – presumably having read it first – requires physical effort and takes time. Enough of us already click through pages of online terms and conditions without a thought to realise the dangers of making signing documents too easy.

The second is personality. Although vulnerable to forgery, the handwritten signature is a deeply personal thing, often influenced by the signatures of our parents, and developed over many years of practice. Its replacement with a typed name would represent not only an aesthetic loss, but a loss of individuality. The internet was meant to enable extreme personalisation, and to some extent it does exactly that. But it is also stripping away the need for it. It is often more convenient just to be like everybody else.