Eli5 How are public figure’s signatures available online without it being a security issue? If movies taught us anything is that signatures have immense power
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You can ink and smear your nose onto a contract as a legally binding signature. The exact shape of the signature doesn’t matter, it’s just the act of you signing it.
>How are public figure’s signatures available online without it being a security issue? If movies taught us anything is that signatures have immense power
A signature is a mutually agreed-upon way of putting assent onto paper. It’s not really a security feature.
You can’t trust everything you see in movies.
The act of signing a legal document is what has the power, not the signature itself. Which is why legal documents related to really big things – marriage, home loans, and such – will often require one or more witnesses to sign that they saw you sign it (of your own volition either explicitly stated or heavily implied).
> signatures have immense power
In reality they don’t. You’d be astonished at how rarely anyone attempts to verify them. In fact, the only reason people still sign credit card receipts is out of habit. The truth is that the fact that you signed it, which is usually caught on video, makes it almost certain that there will be no challenge. Imagine a world where every signature needed to be verified. The world would stop working overnight.
With the advent of “smart contracts” signatures will become less and less important.
As mentioned it’s the act of signing that commits.you to the contract. Prior to public education, a man’s word was his contract, and you did all you could to protect your name in business dealings. For other things like church documents or government documents that the public had to sign, they would put an X on the document and the person would kiss it as a sign of agreement, then the church officer or government official would sign that they witnessed the contract.
Later a thumb print was briefly used to sign documents.
Royalty and upper class had signet rings they would press into a wax seal on the document to sign them.
Yeah, but, dude……..in terms of realism, movies are literally all lies. About the only truth you can glean from a movie is, “hey, look, this movie exists!”
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