Digital ID

There’s a new ritual in modern Britain, and it doesn’t involve tea, queuing or moaning about the weather – though it does involve moaning. It’s that moment when you’re at the dentist, hospital, car hire counter or, for all I know, the vet, and someone cheerfully hands you an iPad and says: “Just sign here with your finger.”

You stare at the little glowing box. You dutifully jab at it, and what appears is not your signature, not even a vague cousin of your signature, but something that looks like a spider fell in ink and had a seizure. You’re meant to believe that this squiggle – this digital sneeze – is legally binding.

In the old days, your signature was your proud flourish – the one thing you wrote the same way every time. It was you. It was unique. Some people even practised theirs as teenagers, dreaming of one day signing autographs. Now, you’re reduced to scrawling on a greasy bit of glass with your fingertip like a toddler drawing a slug.

The companies don’t care, of course. The solicitor, the hospital, the bloke at the phone shop – they all nod solemnly as if you’ve just scrawled the Magna Carta, while the thing you’ve actually produced wouldn’t fool a toddler with crayons. It’s not a signature; it’s an “X” in a slightly pretentious font.

And that’s the absurdity. The whole point of a signature was to prove it was really you. But this new breed of “digital signature” bears no resemblance to your real one. In court, a barrister would hold up your normal signature next to the finger-scrawl, and the jury would assume one was written by you and the other by a drunk otter. But here’s the thing – the law says it doesn’t matter. It’s all about “intent”. So long as you intended to sign, that childlike smudge might as well be a Rembrandt.

What makes it worse is that, in the age of fingerprint scanners, face ID and enough biometric wizardry to identify you from your left ear lobe, we’re still squiggling away like Neanderthals discovering charcoal. A fingerprint – your literal identity pressed into the screen – would be foolproof. But no, instead we smear a half-baked doodle across a tablet, then watch someone solemnly print it on paper as if it’s the Crown Jewels.

It’s modern bureaucracy in a nutshell – something once solemn and precise turned into a farce of convenience. But don’t worry, the tablet assures us that our mangled “X” is recorded with an IP address, timestamp, and possibly a blood sample, so it’s perfectly legal.

In years to come, historians will puzzle over this era. They’ll unearth digital archives filled with misshapen signatures and wonder whether 21st‑century Britain was overrun by an illiterate population who could barely hold a pen. No – we could hold pens. We just weren’t allowed to use them.