I believe for the most part, lawful electronic notarization in California is an unhappy marriage of the notary laws printed in your handbook together with the California version of the Uniform Electronic Transactions act, which may be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&division=3.&title=2.5.&part=2.&chapter=&article=
Sec. 1633.11 says
"(a) If a law requires that a signature be notarized, the requirement is satisfied with respect to an electronic signature if an electronic record includes, in addition to the electronic signature to be notarized, the electronic signature of a notary public together with all other information required to be included in a notarization by other applicable law."
So there is no definition for "electronic notary seal" or "digital stamp". Judging by page 19 of the CA handbook "all the other information required to be included in a notarization by other applicable law" means the CA must put in something that looks like a traditional seal, and it's called a seal. But there's no information about HOW to put the seal in.
In the literature of public key cryptography, which is what all these digital notarization outfits are using, there is no mention of seals. The literature discusses digital signatures, in which nearly all the characters in the document are scrambled together in a very sophisticated way to get a large number. That large number is the secret key. Anyone can take the characters and the notary's public key, and scramble them with a different sophisticated process; if the result matches the digital signature in the document, the signature is verified. If it doesn't match, the document has been altered.
In this literature, a digital signature is just a number. An image of a hand written signature is just a picture, no more significant than the logo of the law firm that drew up the deed. |
