House Passes Digital Signature Bill

DrewMIT writes "Finally," electronic signatures" will have the same validity legislatively as ink signatures." It still needs to go through the senate, and the White House has said it will veto it. The article is quite negative, it talks about how this will violate consumer rights, but all I can think is "Its about time." What do you think?

Comments

Ugh...more e-mail

[wesmills]

The bill would also allow companies -- when consumers agree -- to deliver warranties, notices and other required disclosures in electronic form.

This is absolutely what I *do* *not* want. I have a hard enough time as it is getting my CC company to follow the disclosure laws, and now they can just say "well, we sent it. your computer must've eaten the e-mail." As I read the bill, this would strengthen the corporation's rights of notification even beyond the standard you're-considered-notified-3-days-after-we-mail-th is provision. I also note that me notifying them electronically is not addressed.

This will suck, I believe. Just think, you get an electronic notification in a lovely HTML message (that you can't read on text readers), with a note up top in 5pt type "please see below for account information." If you do take the time to read it, you find that in 15 days, your interest rate skyrockets from 13 to 23%, your payments are due in 10 days after the bill, oh and we're going to sell every bit of data we have about you. You may cancel your card under the original terms by sending written notice, in triplicate, to the following address that is written in off-white/grey text on a white background.

Oh, but wait, you say! The consumer has to agree to this! So, now when you sign up for something like this, Agreement 2, Section 9, Paragraph 12, Sentence 48 specifically says that you agree to electronic notifications. Come on...since when have you gotten to negotiate the fine print on a contract with a big corporation?

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