this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Privacy
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Yes the PDF-"signing" mascarade is beyond ridiculous but that's definitely a thing in Europe too, certainly France and Germany. Maybe only for private businesses at this point, yeah. Personally I have a whole production line up and ready for photoshopping sigs and initials and even handwritten dates onto PDFs in order to comply with dumb instructions. It's as if a handwritten signature, even in PNG form, has a magical superpower to make a document authentic. A bit like the security theater at entrances to buildings and transport. What's important is to go through the motions of securing something, to prove that you really want it to be secure, rather than actually to secure it. A rite, basically.
But yes, having said all that, the alternative is maybe even worse! We're gonna find out.
While Germany cards doesn't seem to have a digital / smartcard component, French ones do. In Portugal and Spain at least you're required to sign digital documents with your identity card, using a smartcard reader + a small utility app provided by the gov. Only those have legal value and this is enforced. Scanned handwritten signatures have zero value, and I know this also applied for other EU countries.