First this is a great idea. Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better.
I haven't used the feature, but from reading the blog post it is sad to see how poorly Google executes on products, even at the beta stage.
Some context:
I've built such a product before and eSigs are more simple than they seem as long as you do a few things. 1) You need to verify somebody's identity. Sending them an email with the request is a valid way of doing this. 2) You need to make the final signed document easily accessible (e.g. emailing all parties a copy of the signed document. 3) You need to not obscure what the person is signing (they need to be able to easily see the entire document if they wish) 4) You need to make it possible for all parties to verify the validity of a signature, which is done with an audit trail appended to the back of the document. 5) Some types of contracts are not valid to be signed with eSign. 6) The parties need to agree to do business electronically, but this is mostly up to them.
You do not need to create fake wet signatures, cryptographically sign a document, or do encryption beyond what is necessary for normal compliance. Those are all UX or marketing features: they don't hurt, just that according to experts I have spoken to, they aren't a factor when going to court.
And then we have what Google is offering:
From the screenshots, I think it is only a fake wet signature. I'm not sure how valid that is.
Apparently you cannot ask for an eSignature from non-Gmail users right now. But how are you supposed to know they are Gmail users? Can Google not send people a simple email with a link? This alone makes the feature almost worthless, and for something that seems so trivial.
They also said they will only be adding an audit trail later this year. This is really sketchy because I believe it means you, nor anybody else can actually verify if it has been signed. Again, this is quite trivial: you store the audit trail in a database, and you append the log as pages onto the back of the PDF document.
> Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better.
I just find these comments to be so strange. You can look at all of the articles in that blog to see all of the feature improvements that have launched in Docs over the past 2 years. It's a lot of stuff.
Maybe they're not features that matter to you, some are available only to paid customers as opposed to free tier, or maybe you just haven't bothered to even notice. But they're there.
It's nothing about Google specifically -- I see people make these comments about so much software, where they assume a project is or has been dead, just because they can't even be bothered to look at the changelog. It baffles me.
It's like, unless it's a radical total UX overhaul, people don't notice the work developers are putting in on actual features. And if it is a radical total UX overhaul, people complain about the change because they assume it's superficial rather than actual features.
I have a Google Spreadsheet that I used to track investments I have in various markets. Three months ago Google stopped showing any stock quotes for ETFs in Europe. No explanation, just 'f u, we showed them for years now all your spreadsheet breaks'. I had to help myself with getting some quotes from Yahoo News via script but it's half-baked.[1]
Google doesn't care about it's products and anyone who thinks different hasn't opened their eyes.
Btw their lack of quality and care is not new for Google Docs/Spreadsheets [2] Issues keep popping up but are usually fixed after a while. This time they just stopped bothering.
I wish Google had Product leaders who actually cared about the quality of their products rather than just launching new features that make a splash and then slowly wither on a vine. Fewer features I could actually rely on would go a long way.
I just wished they had product people that worked outside the tech bubble. I need a way to write a letter to multiple people without some scripting magic or third-party add-ons.
They don't. They're famous for wanting Product people with engineering backgrounds, which is silly. That's not Product, that's just engineering/project management then. Product is way more all-encompassing and focuses more on people, user's wishes, behaviours, competitor's behaviours etc etc, none of which is relevant to engineering.
As a daily Google Sheet users, I am thankful and amazed by the monthly, or even daily improvement of the product for the past 5 years. Folks will be surprised how many hedge funds and quants use them for quick idea sketch
I don't know. From what I've seen, a lot software gets built by a small group of people. It becomes wildly popular and the is maintained by a behemoth churning out minor features at a snails pace while everyone frets about the even the smallest product changes.
It's easy to experiment and build when your product is small and few people use it. When you're bringing in real money and most of the Fortune 500 is using your software, it's a lot harder to add anything meaningful for fear of rocking the boat. And note, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the business is doing well, there might not really be a need for many new features.
And yet Microsoft manages to make regular, significant feature additions (and occasional, less nice/useful large changes), despite being a critical software dependency for pretty much all of the Fortune 500.
Well, yeah, because the risk/reward of the decision making changes, purely in terms of dollars/second for an outage, never-mind legal and reputation risk.
Also, the value of features follows a power law. Some features are incredibly valuable to everyone. Some features only a few people care about. And then there’s a long tail.
In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams.
At some point every product runs out of high value, visible features to add that anyone cares about. This isn’t a failure mode. It’s the opposite. This is the final state that most successful software should aspire to reach.
I have a lot more respect for teams that understand this, and let their products find their UX steady state. Fastmail. Git. Vim. WhatsApp. And yes, Google docs.
> In a product as old as Google docs, they honestly have all the important features that most people actually care about already. You can save. You can track changes. You can set up custom styles. Or embed images. You can edit docs collaboratively. Or programmatically via their api. Documents look the same on basically everyone’s computer. And they can be in shared folders for teams.
I think this is pretty interesting, because I don't necessarily agree. If we were starting from a blank slate in a world where a spreadsheet hadn't existed before I suspect the perfect spreadsheet software would look pretty different to Google sheets or excel, but because this software has been around for a long time they're part of the standard interfaces for computers, like a mouse or keyboard. If you deviate too far from the current design people get confused and default back to what they know i.e. excel with all it's quirks.
> If we were starting from a blank slate in a world where a spreadsheet hadn't existed before I suspect the perfect spreadsheet software would look pretty different to Google sheets or excel
I agree with you. But I also think at this point excel and google sheets are past the point where people would tolerate a radical redesign. If google or microsoft want to invent a better spreadsheet, I think it makes more sense to try those ideas out in a brand new product. Excel and Google Sheets are "done".
If you use Google Docs daily and even bother to look at the menus, the amount of changes added just the past 2 years is pretty massive. The reason they're in menus is because the dumbest thing Google can do is kill the native user experience.
Just look at how slow Notion is and how snappy Docs is. Yet, a lot of Notion features are now in Google Docs.
Then you missed them or looked at the wrong blog entry tags or something. Over the past 3 years, I wouldn't be suprised if it added up to 100 new changes/features in Docs alone (not including Sheets etc.). There's generally 2-3 new things per month.
They're useless. I've been paying for Google Docs for over a decade. Nothing of note has been added until they finally... FINALLY let me get rid of the concept of "pages" recently.
If you have to look at a changelog to understand what changed, then the stuff that's being shipped isn't making a difference.
In Europe, including the UK and EEA, there is the eIDAS regulation, which outlines the requirement for eSignatures (amongst other things).
In order for a signature to be recognised, it has to meet one of three trust levels
1. Electronic signature: this is basically something that puts a distinguishing mark on a file.
2. Advanced electronic signature: these use cryptography according to the specifications set out in the regulation, but anyone can make them. There are some requirements about how a person’s identity is linked to their signature.
3. Qualified electronic signature: these are advanced electronic signatures which have been produced with a recognised trust service provider. Each country has a list of trust service providers, and each other country mutually recognises their trust lists.
It is a bit more detailed than that, but in general, simple transactions can pretty much use any electronic signature (but this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The uk generally doesn’t need anything fancier than docusign). In order for something to be completely watertight, it needs to be a qualifying electronic signature.
In order for these features to be useful in Europe, google will need to meet the requirements of the regulations, and specify a trust level.
This isn't the case for most agreements. Most agreements have no 'form' requirements - ie. you could write it on a napkin at a restaurant. As long as both parties believe they are making a legally binding agreement, then they have made a legally binding agreement.
Use of technology doesn't change that. The only time a court would throw out a signature made online is if the online platform was somehow deceiving the parties - for example by showing different text to each side when they click 'i agree'.
The issue isn't necessarily the form of the agreement, it's verifying the identity of the signatories.
If you can't see the other person signing the agreement, you need to verify that the right person is signing it. It's much the same issues that exist with simple passwords versus 2FA; shared accounts, piracy, identity theft, etc.
eIDAS is a set of standards for verifying identity that is backed by law. It allows businesses to follow protocols (some similar to 2FA) with the assurance that it will be held up in court.
Ultimately where this matters is if one party contests the validity of a contract. I'm not sure how it works in the EU, but in the US that would mean a court would ultimately make that decision. To that end, they could decide that two people agreeing in an email thread is enough. It's all about your risk appetite.
However, notice that Google has not said they are compliant with any regulation.
It’s more than a handshake deal — they are making their mark on a contract. This stems from the time before wide literacy and the ability to write, where people would make an X mark on the paper. Sometimes neither party could not read the actual contract, which was written by scribes. So the emoji is a mark.
- this was used in the past on other contracts between the two
Note that judge looked into the meaning of the emoji, looked into how it was interpreted before, and said "but nevertheless under these circumstances this was a valid way to convey the two purposes of a ‘signature,”‘ Keene wrote in his decision."
Note purposes of a signature, not signature. FYI, making a mark is still legal, judges know it, yet that language was not used.
And you don't look into how a emoji was used by other people, if it is being used as a uniquoe "mark" aka "signature" aka "trade mark".
Because a mark, a signature is unique. An emoji is as un-unique as a word such as YES.
This is also why someone cannot trademark a colour, or a generic font. Trademarks aka marks aka signatures mist be unique.
In this case, the decision was "he accepted the deal", just as a handshake or verbal OK.
Marks do not have to be unique. It is the act of doing so, symbolised by the mark, that forms the contract. It was commonly just an X.
This particular case hinges more on whether the emoji :thumb_up means agreement or acknowledgement. However if the person had habitually been agreeing with a mark then that would weigh in favor. It's not clear without the exhibit of previous text messages, but strongly implied by the wording, that this was indeed the case.
So this was accepted as a written contract with mutually agreed terms. There was no verbal addendum or additional terms.
As far as I understand it is mostly relevant when the electronic signature is already explicitly required beforehand. For example some government projects might require a valid electronic signature on offers among a million other things. In this case the electronic signature isn't important because it is a signature, but because it is a requirement and missing any requirement can get your offer and even already signed contracts thrown out if a competitor catches wind of it.
The article links to the help page for the feature: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12315692. It seems likely that it'd be a lot better at answering your questions than looking at screenshots.
> They also said they will only be adding an audit trail later this year. This is really sketchy because I believe it means you, nor anybody else can actually verify if it has been signed.
From the help page it seems obvious that both the sender and signers are able to check whether the contract has been signed. "1. Open the respective PDF file in Drive or through the link in the email notification. 2. Click View details in the upper right corner of the PDF to open the right side panel and view eSignature details."
Are you saying that the only possible valid implementation of an audit log is one appended to the contract pdf?
> Can Google not send people a simple email with a link?
Obviously they could. But equally obviously from your description, this is not a feature where sending one email with one link is sufficient. Based on the help page the final signed contract is "saved in your Drive", an operation that's not meaningful for a random email address that won't have an associated Google Drive. It seems likely that this is a feature that would be blocked on e.g. embedding the audit log in the pdf as per the discussion above.
> > Can Google not send people a simple email with a link?
> Obviously they could. But equally obviously from your description, this is not a feature where sending one email with one link is sufficient. Based on the help page the final signed contract is "saved in your Drive", an operation that's not meaningful for a random email address that won't have an associated Google Drive. It seems likely that this is a feature that would be blocked on e.g. embedding the audit log in the pdf as per the discussion above.
None of this really matters. I totally agree with the parent comment: having an e-signature product that is only usable by other Gmail users (and of course their is really no way to know if any particular email address is a Gmail user) makes it useless. What, so if I need some docs signed I'll get half of them signed with DocuSign and the other half with Docs? Of course not, I'll just use the product that works with anyone.
Google used to have this same "can only share docs with other Drive users" feature, though it's improved somewhat. In general I think the enterprise doc sharing features are so bad in Drive that the only way I can wrap my head around it is to think that Google is scared of antitrust concerns if they too closely tried to emulate features from the likes of Dropbox, Box and others.
As someone that consults in this space I more or less agree with you. Requirements are derived from interpretation of UETA and ESIGN Act. Itext has a good write up and great library to leverage when taking on project like this. Docusign has a good writeup on esign/UETA. ESRA is the goto body on the subject, and if you need legal opinion DLA Piper is the goto in the industry. This stuff is fairly simple once you know it.
> From the screenshots, I think it is only a fake wet signature. I'm not sure how valid that is
Welcome to 2023! I've bought a house, incorporated a company, signed a work contract and contracted a lawyer just based on Adobe mobile wet signatures on PDFs.
2023? All my signatures at least in the last decade were fake wet signatures. All leasing docs, employment docs, and banks...
I use the Preview App that comes standard on OSX. You scan a signature on a piece of paper with your webcam. Then you can just "paste it" anywhere, I even give it a dark blue shade.
I had a single person give me shit and say they needed "ink on paper" insisting me to print/sign/scan.
I just ran the PDF file through a website that makes it look like it was scanned with some imperfections and tilt. I wouldn't be able to tell it myself.
> I just ran the PDF file through a website that makes it look like it was scanned with some imperfections and tilt.
I don't trust any websites for that. Instead I display the document on the laptop monitor where the page has a white background but everything beyond the page is black. Then I use my phone's builtin scanner to "scan" my laptop screen.
I do the same - if anyone asks, I tell them it is a scanned copy.
I honestly did look at conformed signatures etc with a desire to do things "properly". However, all too often it was a problem - so fake signature it is.
I do one extra step and "print to pdf" so that signature and annotations (if I have typed in content on a form) are flattened in the final pdf.
Same here. I don't think I've signed anything by hand other than a restaurant bill or the occasional time I'm handed a document in person within the last 8 years or so.
Adding to your list, even government documents as well as those related to my medical practice and licensing/registration stating "electronic signatures are not accepted" have taken the wet signature from Apple.
Ack, are you sure "some movement on making Google Docs better"... Google Docs is miles better than o365's alternatives. Holy cow is Microsoft's attempt laggy, bloated and a pain to have to use.
> From the screenshots, I think it is only a fake wet signature. I'm not sure how valid that is.
This seems perfectly acceptable in my jurisdiction. Then again, Kentucky is pretty laid back. By statute, an electronic signature is just a mark made electronically that is intended by the signer to be a signature. That's about it. Same as if I were to sign by hand, but electronic.
Call me naive, but these laws that make electronic signatures some complicated thing seem messy to me. It's a signature. If you want to verify ID, then do that, but don't conflate the two.
I think Notion/Office 365/Airtable scared them a lot.
Office 365: Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft products, this is actually a fully featured online version of Word, unlike Google Docs which has a subset of the features and layout.
Notion/Airtable: A good portion of the use cases for Google Docs/Sheets (at least in your run of the mill tech company) are better served by Notion in terms of better structure, components, templates, and so on. The hacks that I have seen people do to get around limitations in Google's suite of products just to do something fairly conventional is a shame.
I haven't used the feature, but from reading the blog post it is sad to see how poorly Google executes on products, even at the beta stage.
Some context:
I've built such a product before and eSigs are more simple than they seem as long as you do a few things. 1) You need to verify somebody's identity. Sending them an email with the request is a valid way of doing this. 2) You need to make the final signed document easily accessible (e.g. emailing all parties a copy of the signed document. 3) You need to not obscure what the person is signing (they need to be able to easily see the entire document if they wish) 4) You need to make it possible for all parties to verify the validity of a signature, which is done with an audit trail appended to the back of the document. 5) Some types of contracts are not valid to be signed with eSign. 6) The parties need to agree to do business electronically, but this is mostly up to them.
You do not need to create fake wet signatures, cryptographically sign a document, or do encryption beyond what is necessary for normal compliance. Those are all UX or marketing features: they don't hurt, just that according to experts I have spoken to, they aren't a factor when going to court.
And then we have what Google is offering:
From the screenshots, I think it is only a fake wet signature. I'm not sure how valid that is.
Apparently you cannot ask for an eSignature from non-Gmail users right now. But how are you supposed to know they are Gmail users? Can Google not send people a simple email with a link? This alone makes the feature almost worthless, and for something that seems so trivial.
They also said they will only be adding an audit trail later this year. This is really sketchy because I believe it means you, nor anybody else can actually verify if it has been signed. Again, this is quite trivial: you store the audit trail in a database, and you append the log as pages onto the back of the PDF document.