eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive | Hacker News Reader

eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

447 pointsrc00170 comments

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.

You've both summed up everything wrong with design churn and also justified it. Truly a cursed comment.

I've seen it regress a lot in the last two years.

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.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/googlesheets/comments/13i2gf6/googl...

[2] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/76403135?pli=1

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

hedge funds and quants also use pen and paper 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".

I looked through these posts for the last three years and there are less than five features that actually pertain Google Docs.

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.

Here, go nuts:

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/search/label/Google%...

> But they're there.

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.

Apparently in Canada a thumbs up emoji is valid as a signature for a contract.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/06/canada-judge-t...

Not a signature, just that he accepted the deal. And note that he had accepted deals the same way before.

Accepting the terms, just as a handshake, on a deal, can bind one.

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.

https://www.swanngalleries.com/news/autographs/2023/01/the-s...

That was not the court decision. The newspapers are giving snippets of the judge's decision, out of context.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/farmer-ordered-to-pay-a...

The nuance here us that:

- the emoji was bring used to reply with an OK

- 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.

Not is: can be

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.

what is the legal name for "monopoly company requires ID and location to view common document" ?

Capitalism.

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.

> Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better.

Recently, they have also improved the UI on Google Docs and Gmail making it much less laggy.

On my old NUC computer, it makes a big difference.

It seems that middle-management is becoming a bit less sclerotic.

Chrome improvements might be helping there too.

Maybe, but this is something I experienced on Firefox ESR.

> You do not need to create fake wet signatures

I’ve seen US Fed agencies reject signed documents when the signature is typed out, so the need exists.

> 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

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.

Presumably this is all valid?

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.

> Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better.

Google Docs have been improving a LOT over the last year or so.

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.

We use DocuSign here and the amount of time I spend hopping back and forth (exporting and importing) between Google and DocuSign is annoyingly high. If Google were to enter this space... I would personally welcome it.

Personally I found the entire design and the organization of files/docs/sheets between Google Drive and other apps in the Google ecosystem is confusing as hell. There was no way to follow a specific hierarchy and the commenting/reviewing system felt clunky.

Wish I never had to use this Google suite of products if it wasn't for my employer.

Maybe you should give it another look. Hierarchy eas terrible because it was originally designed to have tags instead of folders and these were prone for cyclic references. When they implemented folders they implemented them on top of tags and things never worked out great.

It got a lot simpler since they nuked tags in favor of folders.

You would hate Microsoft 365 then. I find Google Drive extremely clean and easy to use.

I think if any enterprise reevaluated their e-signature needs they'd decide they don't need it at all. There's just better ways to track consents and contracts.

Could you elaborate on this? I'd love to stop collecting signatures, but I can't imagine an alternative.

Checking a box while logged in is unequivocally superior to e-signature. What are you actually solving with e-signature? What bank requires you to Docusign anything to create an account or authorize a transaction? Do you e-sign when you read the Apple terms of service? You could literally stop using Docusign and replace it with nothing. It's there for old-school lawyers to feel secure and not have to worry about precedent which stopped being relevant years ago. Clicking "accept" on a little popup is legally enforceable for GDPR.

If you're doing contracts, how about a webform where you ask the signatories to answer 5 questions to prove they understand the terms then click submit? That is miles more legally defensible than an e-signature.

Gotcha, so contracts are still necessary (red-lining, customer specific terms, retention, etc.) but e-signature should just be a checkbox. Is that right? If so, then yeah, I think that's fine except it doesn't obviate the need for DocuSign. The e-signature is probably just a relic/reflection of what users expect in order to add a layer of professionalism.

I think this is the death of docusign right here that we’re witnessing

Yeah, unless Google kills this product in 2 years, which has a quite high probability.

This isn't a DocuSign killer yet and won't be for a while until Google get its enterprise story right. DocuSign is deeply integrated with third party workflows in large organizations. That's where the big bucks are and you can build a sticky business.

On the one hand this is true, however there's another side to this that makes it quite compelling.

IT sign-off and buying new IT services is hard in many large businesses. This means that it's almost always worth using a built-in feature of software you already have, than going for external software. Add to this the fact that companies almost never have one company account, each team re-buys the same software because services are hard, and the fact that most companies already use DocuSign matters a bit less.

Much of Slack's growth has been built on this[^1]. You can sign up for a free account and start inviting your immediate team. Paying for a small team is well under the typical auto-approved expenses limit, and when you've sunk your cost, got a bunch of people onboard, and proved the value, only then do you go to IT to get it rolled out across the business.

Individuals using this sort of thing, termed "shadow IT", is a good way to grow usage. This feature of docs seems well positioned to grow that way even if DocuSign is available.

[^1]: I worked on a team that was required by the business to use MS Teams. While we waited for the Teams workspace to be provisioned and all the authentication crap to be sorted out we signed up for Slack, invited everyone, and got work done for the 6 months it took to get a working Teams workspace.

I would counterargue that the people who do use it (such as myself) find it a pain to switch between interfaces and will campaign to get DocuSign replaced. If switching over is less painful than that of using DocuSign, we will switch over. Most will put their daily workload above what's better for the company financially

Google won't release an "X-killer" until Google is broken up by anti-monopoly regulators. Until then, google will let millions of dollars of easy money go by in order to avoid giving regulators examples of google using it's control of the internet to replicate products and push the incumbent companies out of business. This is why all google features are half-baked and killed. Fear of regulators.

DocuSign shmocusign. Digital signatures is the most bizarrely anachronistic technology on the Internet. Even credit card vendors gave up on signatures.

There's a difference between DocuSign signatures ("I agree to this contract/agreement") and credit card signatures ("Here's a scribble which is somehow unique to me.")

Yeah, I've been surprised to learn how DocuSign is used by some large corporations and government agencies. It's the system that manages all sorts of forms and workflows within the orgs, not just contracts going outside the org.

Third party workflows like... Google Docs?

Like Salesforce

Makes sense. For Google implementing this is probably regulatory mainly, not technical. Given how expensive alternatives are, this will be a boon for small contractual actions, though I doubt any huge enterprises will (immediately) switch.

Major limitation for now though is:

> Non-Gmail users: the ability to request an eSignature from non-Gmail users

Hopefully it's addressed sooner (September/October) rather than later (November/December).

Is this targeted for the US market or also the EU? Does this qualify as a an advanced electronic signature (AdES) under the eIDAS regulation?

Author of open-pdf-sign here. AdES alone is difficult to do without proper signatures and user verification. Besides that, if Google would go for advanced electronic signatures, I'd expect it showing up in the EU Trusted List, which it isn't. So unless Google is not utilizing their own Google Trust Services certificate authority, I'd say it's unlikely that they will launch with AdES that are compatible with eIDAS.

Thanks for your answer, I appreciate it.

Although strictly speaking if they would only want to do AdES and not QES, they wouldn't have to be in the EU Trusted List, would they?

No it doesn't, not considered as a trusted (certified) provider and doesn't meet the level for secure user authentication.

It's like a gadget in Europe then.

But still, it is useful.

It can be used if you want to ask your daughter to promise to "Get good grades at school" in exchange for an extra Christmas gift, for example.

And make it look like official.

It's like pretending to be signing.

In other words: is strictly less useful than a "fake analog signature" script that uses imagemagick to paste a PNG/SVG with a signature (or a random one from a directory of signatures) on the last page of the document, and then to apply some or all of random {sub-2deg rotation, tiny gaussian blur, tiny non-linear transform, color threshold, strong desaturation}, to make it seem like the document was printed out, signed, and scanned back.

I skip the script and (if they bother asking) tell people I have a really good scanner, a really good pen and am incredibly consistent with my signature even when I sign totally different sizes.

Sounds like you have a handy script to paste here... :)

I don’t have any inside info here, but anecdotally, Google seems good at meeting regulatory requirements. I wouldn’t be surprised if it does meet this if it’s available in the EU.

Many Latinamerican countries also use digital signatures (e.g PAdES). I wonder if they support this? LATAM always seems to be forgotten by big tech.

Being available doesn't mean it's considered legally valid. I can sign with the private key on my national id…

14 months in testing, followed by a beta, is really moving too slow.

The alternative is launching too soon, getting it wrong, and being accused of killing everything.

Is that the only alternative?

Not when it's a legal feature designed for enterprises.

A partner company willing to test it is going to take 3 months to review and choose to adopt it, another 3 months trying to convert a few internal flows, and another 6 months to observe how it changes processes and whether it's an improvement or not.

The point here is to get it right, not to get it quick. Enterprise software is the literal opposite of "move fast and break things".

14 months in testing, 0 support of eIDAS, the main electronic signature regulation and platform in Europe.

Given that there are entire research papers titled things like "Analysing the impact of the GDPR on eIDAS" I'm not surprised that they launched without support...

This is normal for Google, especially when some legal matters are involved.

This is an intentionally crippled product. Google can't afford to give regulators a reason to go after them for a couple billion dollars. Google or Microsoft could easily have created a DocuSign competitor and killed DocuSign, like they killed netscape, wordperfect, etc. Now that they respectively control the internet and the enterprise software suite, they have one primary goal: protect and grow the cash cow. Everything else is a marketing exercise or a concessionary project given to keep busy the tens of thousands of computer scientists that they are paying to keep out of competitors/startups payrolls.

What's the rush for this?

What is the minimum required functionality to roll your own e-signature which would be LEGALLY BINDING under the e-sign act?

Seems all we need is:

Consent to do business electronically — All parties must agree to conduct transactions electronically, either explicitly or implied.

Intent to sign — E-signatures are only valid if the signer intended to sign. Signature requests need to be declinable.

Association of signature with the record — Signers must make a visible mark or statement on the e-document.

Attribution — Whether a name or a unique mark, the signature must be attributable to the person signing and only linked to them.

Record retention — Signed electronic documents must be saved, viewed, or printed by either party and stored for future reference.

Everything which takes away from DocuSign is a win!

Last time I had to implement Okta integration for DocuSign at my employer it was absurdly expensive. If Google does this right then I’d be ever so happy.

DocuSign on the SSO Tax site: https://sso.tax/

There are alternatives: https://github.com/docusealco/docuseal

I would like esignatures to be backed by strong electronic authentication, like EIDAS

My ID card has a chip in it and can be used to sign documents. Why not support that?

Because their biggest markets do not? And it's a just announced, beta feature!

Hmm, I just looked and it turns out not to be a requirement of all EU ID cards.

Why make a proper real legal signature when you can just copy paste a scanned .jpg file at the end of a document (or do something equally useless)?

copy-paste a png of you typing your name recording your IP...

...vs cryptographic proof someone had access to your ID card

> ...vs cryptographic proof someone had access to your ID card

Which isn't what we are discussing here, this was the point… :)

Another set of startups that is just a feature on one of the big platforms.

This is enough for me to upgrade from Workspace Starter to Standard. DocuSign is extremely expensive for what you get.

We attempted to create this last year with https://pleasesign.me. Definitely a case of waiting too long on a good idea. Ah well, it still has some features Google might not launch :)

Many, many, many years ago I operated pleaselocate.me when mapping SKDs and geoip were first becoming available to any kid with a website - it brought me some joy to see people are still using this style of domain

I like fun domains that just make sense :)

Looks great

We are developing a digital signatures solution, https://bulksign.com which also has a on-premise version (in addition to SAAS). In Europe, at least, we see an increase in interest for customers having the solution installed on their own servers for security reasons. So more people become aware that sending your confidential documents to a 3rd party is not that great security wise.

As long as this doesn’t pretend like a signature is a cryptographic tool, I’m generally a fan of doing away with nonsense like Docusign.

I was hoping it's this https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/D... but unfortunatey we are not there yet

At this point I'm worried if Google will sunset their new features. Does anyone else have similar worries? At a personal level, I got bitten couple of times, or may be even more... (one was for the Inbox - or zero email gmail concept and second time with Google Domains)

The main thing about eSignature is the willingness and ability to go to court to defend your tool and process. For the org that can't be be bothered to have a barebone customer service, I'm not sure how this will workout.

It's not like DocuSign does any sort of identity verification. I signed up for a free account and they validated my email address, that's it. That would be the only identifier associated with my signature, so Google actually has more information than them.

Doesnt matter. Ultimately Docusign will show up in court to defend their product and the contract. Google can't even bother to provide an automated response

Do you have any particular cases in mind where Docusign mounted a spirited defense in court despite not being one of the parties? How did those cases turn out?

At least their terms of service don't suggest any kind of general legal indemnification of customers, only a limited one around loss of confidentiality caused by security breaches in their systems.

What makes you think Google won't show up in court? They do kinda neglect their free end users, but go to great lengths to appease enterprise clients (see: Google Cloud Platform)

There is customer service available to paid workspace accounts.

Docusign stock doesn't seem to have taken a hit (yet):

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DOCU/

But thankfully Jump had some insider knowledge.

https://beststocks.com/jump-financial-llcs-significant-reduc...

Jump are market makers, not a hedge fund, that position was $6.5M at peak. Probably part of an options trade. But at this size 100% not an actual investment.

Those articles are auto-generated from regulatory filings. Down in that article they write about a 270 share investment, that's neither size nor notable.

The only chance for it to fly among the SMB in Brazil where DocuSign and ClickSign are the major players is by adding WhatsApp to the signature workflow. Notifications via email alone won't work.

Happy to see more useful features added to tools I already use. Along with improvements to Google Forms, I expect a lot of light DocuSign and JotForm users will cancel their subscriptions.

For a tiny moment I thought this might be about making cryptographic signatures available to the masses. A sign that there’s still some good left in Google.

I should have known better.

The top items in my wishlist are spreadsheet-like formula anywhere in a gdoc, spreadsheet-like tables, and support of Latex or MathJax. That is, keep up with Quip.

No x509 certificates involved?

In countries with legally binding digital signatures (I.e. Argentina) you need a cert issued following identity verification.

So it covers basically all use cases in the USA and most private commercial use cases in the EU. Seems reasonably useful for many people.

Most countries that accept eSignatures don't require digital certificates. There aren't many other countries as strict as Argentina. See for ex https://www.hellosign.com/blog/electronic-signature-laws-aro...

'in tandem with our shrinking ambitions the size of company we are considering cloning is also shrinking'

Bad news for DocuSign

Finally, I was wondering when Google Docs was going to implement this. eSignature platforms had a solid boom in the past ten years, but they all seemed to gatekeep rudimentary features behind tiered paywalls.

Will this be admissible in court of law ? I know docusign is.

On what basis is it determined that particular signing tech is admissable

It varies by jurisdiction, but examples like this show that very little can be needed.

https://www.businessinsider.com/judge-ruled-thumbs-up-emoji-...

Varies by jurisdiction of course. Under American law and similar systems the admissibility of a type of evidence is established by it having been admitted before, and the initial admission is based on the judgement of some individual judge.

> American law and similar systems the admissibility of a type of evidence is established by it having been admitted before

It’s also been statute since 2000 [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Signatures_in_Glo...

It would also vary by use-case. Some regulated industries have specific standards required for an electronic signature — and hitting those standards is typically an add-on cost for systems like Docusign.

What's an e-sign anyway? It's basically an IP address that's often a VPN now

Bye bye Docusign?

RIP Dropbox

The important question is, when is Google going to kill this functionality? DocuSign only has to hold out until then.

I wonder what happens to documents that were signed with this thing after they kill the product.

Also, I wonder if the person signing the document has to agree to Google's entire ToS in order to sign the document.

Congress could fix both issues with some well-thought-out legislation:

- Signatures from these things have to support external validation via standard tools (e.g., Google uses PGP or whatever to sign the signature + document + metadata).

- If the act of accessing or signing a contract implicitly incorporates other contracts, then either (a) the signature is non-binding of (b) the incorporated contracts are rendered unenforceable, regardless of whether they were agreed to via other means.

DocuSign should start working on their "Import from Google Docs" feature.

They can even run a marketing/TV campaign around this, lol.

“Google Docs ships with esignatures now… but how long until Google kills another one of their products? Stay safe with DocuSign, import your Google Docs signatures and keep them forever, with or without Google.”

It's funny, this is exactly what I was wondering.

Reminds me of Keyenes : Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent

Yeah wouldn't want it to go the way of Google Toolbar, that thing would definitely be relevant today.

> Yeah wouldn't want it to go the way of Google Toolbar, that thing would've definitely been relevant today.

Hm... I briefly was a part of the Google Toolbar team back in 2008. How would it be relevant today? All of the features that I remember, are now a part of the browser itself (whether it's Firefox, Safari, Edge or Chrome/Chromium).

That said, the eSignature for Google Docs feature would definitely benefit from some strong (preferably, legal & irrevocable) commitment to keep it alive for 40+ years or more. Otherwise, I fail to see how it's useful.

Exactly. I was pointing out that not every app/service has to be preserved and supported forever.

> Anyway, just thought that whipping out "Google kills products" meme for a mere feature was a bit much.

I know I’m beating a dead horse^W^W^W dead Google products but, they really do kill a lot of popular products

https://killedbygoogle.com/

That being said, if they add eSig for Google Docs I agree; I don’t see why nor how they’d kill that individual feature unless they kill Docs all-together. Which, hopefully, they won’t do for many years yet.

A great many of their killed products ended up being merged/evolved into other ones (Duo into Meet). A great many more weren't even "killed"; over the past 20 years their in-gmail chat program has evolved from Talk to Hangouts, and then from Hangouts to Chat. It has kept the same chat history throughout the past 20 years, but "killed by google" lists Talk and Hangouts as two killed products.

> It has kept the same chat history throughout the past 20 years

So how come I can't access chats from before mid-2013? Not even by Google Takeout?

(It so happens that some of the most important conversations in my life happened in 2012, so I'm to date super annoyed that, for no good reason, 2013 is some kind of cut-off date.)

You seem to be right. I'm pretty confident in my memory that the history persisted from Talk to Hangouts, but the Talk history may not have persisted again from Hangouts to Chat. That would line up with your data, as the Talk to Hangouts switch/rename happened in 2013.

but the other part is even when they replace services the new one lacks the same features or ux that made the original special.

inbox vs gmail play music vs youtube music

They certainly kill services, my point is the "Google Graveyard" is very overblown.

Some popular products,sure.

Much of the listed "casualties" were throwaway wrapper apps that have perfectly fine webapp replacements, apps for platforms that no longer exist, duplicates, and stand alone apps that are now features of bigger apps etc.

Haha, I asked ChatGPT to make up some HN comments and it's classic.

https://chat.openai.com/share/9b69427a-b28c-4080-b097-6a0a78...

The HN/LLM concordance ratio is approaching 1. Eventually, I can just remove comments and then fill them in with ChatGPT instead.

No pricing === you are the product

> No pricing === you are the product

True, but is this no pricing? At a glance it appears to be available only to Workspace customers, which I believe you have to pay for (at least I've been paying for it for years).

Google Workspace is a paid-for product?

With google you are the product whether you pay or not. Some of their most valuable data comes from the companies who use google for all of their email, calendar and documents.

https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...

I'd argue it's the least valuable data. They can't look at it, they have regulatory, legal and contractual commitments to protect it, they have paying customers that will be very angry if it's lost or unavailable, and yet they can't mine it or train models with it or monetize it.

Locked account.

I can only imagine the pain this will cause people when they try to execute/sign a contract, and Google randomly locks your account … preventing you from logging in.

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