I get a tremendous advantage from technology. I would not be able to share pictures without the technology revolution that we have had in the last fifteen years.
Getting documents to people is also much easier. Finding additional information that people might need is also a piece of cake with Google and the Internet.
Yet there is one place that technology seems to fail. Our digital identities are hard to verify and utilize. I actually had someone pretend to be me on a forum. People figured out that it wasn’t me, but it should not be so easy for someone to impersonate you. We have the technology to prove who we are digitally. Unfortunately few sites utilize it.
In a regular day to day situation if the need to prove who I am arises, I can show my driver’s license, birth certificate, or passport.
I have digital credentials for my email, an OpenIID identity and actually a smart card for real estate which lets us enter homes. Yet very few people take advantage of digital ids. It is almost as if people like the small degree of anonymity that comes from the digital world.
I have one friend with a digital id. Most of our conversations are encrypted.
It seems funny to me that I send a PDF of a form to a client which is handled usually by printing, signing and faxing back to me.
Why can’t we take the next step and use a smart card digital id to let me send documents and let others to sign and return them.
I recently worked with a client who did not have a computer. I actually had to print photos to send to them. Any documents which needed reviewing had to be mailed. The experience reminded me of how far we have come.
Yet we recently dealt with an individual several states away who needed to sign a title and get it back to us.
He missed the express shipping pickup, and we were delayed a day because of that. It is too bad we don’t have electronic notaries who could validate that the right person is signing a document, then scan and forward a digital version to us that it could be printed as an original and recorded in the proper county.
I know we have the technology to do this. I guess we would just rather keep doing it the hard way.
Our technological infirmity 