[thelist] Digital/Electronic signatures?

[Judah McAuley]

It really depends on what you want to use the signatures for. Are you
just tracking who signed off on what? Do you need to meet a particular
legal standard? If you are in the medical/biological/pharmaceutical
industry, there are industry specific requirements laid out by the FDA
(see safe-biopharma.org).

The most broadly applicable law (if you are in the US) is called eSign
(Electronic Signatures In Global and National commerce). The major
areas that you want to look into are whether you have to prove simple
intent, which can be done with a "I agree to these terms and
conditions" checkbox where you store the datetime of the agreement and
the text of the agreement along with a link to their user account
which presumably has information that authenticates them (like name,
address, phone number, etc).  If you need to prove more than that,
then you start getting into needing to use digital certificates or
physical biometric capture devices, like the signature pads you use
when UPS delivers a package to you. Then you can capture the biometric
information and cryptographically bind the signature to the agreement.
At that point you have to then show chain of custody...who has had
control of it and can you show there hasn't been tampering.

If you are looking at anything beyond a basic click-through agreement,
then I'd start with Adobe who has well recognized support for
electronic signatures in PDF documents. If you go the route of doing
physical signature capture, take a look at Topaz, their devices have
been pretty easy for us to work with so far.

And have your company talk to their lawyer. Do a little research
yourself, look at eSign and some of the other laws, take a look at
what the other people on this thread have mentioned plus Adobe and
such, then decide what the goal of the project is. What are you trying
to protect? If the rubber hits the road and lawyers come calling, what
are you trying to prove? Take that information, give it to the lawyer
and let them help you come up with something that that lawyer can
defend because in the end, that's who is going to be doing it.

Cheers,
Judah

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 2:41 AM,  <rogerharness at comcast.net> wrote:
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> Evolters,
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> I've been asked to look into the ability to use digital/electronic signatures in our department.
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> Currently we have a Training Request document that gets filled out by an employee, then a hard-copy goes to his/her supervisor  for "approval" (sign and date), then gets routed/faxed to our office for final approval (again, signed and dated), and finally gets sent BACK to the employee.
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> I've been googling/etc., and I've been finding commercial products that might help, but most of what I've seen out there requires some sort of application or at least plug-in to make anything even close to this work.
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> We are working with our IT department to create a new Learning Management System (LMS) that at some point -may- allow users to register for training via this LMS, and automatically have an approval request sent to the employee's supervisor, then once approved by the supervisor, the request is sent back to our office.
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> But in the meantime, I'm just trying to research if there are any folks currently using any type of electronic/digital signatures that might compare to what we're looking for. -Is- anyone using any type of digital signatures that don't necessarily require additional applications, plug-ins, etc.
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> As always, thank you in advance for any help/tips/etc.!
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> -Roger Harness
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