eli5: why do we still rely on hand signatures to validate contracts?

Question

aren’t by now easy to fake? (e.g hand-writing robots)

Plus we often do digital signatures, which are basically a jpg on top of a PDF document, no?

In: 132

Answer 1

The primary purpose of a signature is not to authenticate. It’s to provide a clear action that signifies “I am now hereby agreeing to this contract.” In theory it could be done in other ways, like you could have a checkbox that says “check here to sign the contract.” But signatures are a traditional and agreed-upon way of doing this.