Here we cover six important reasons for NOT using Remote Online Notarization.

We're living in an era driven by technological advancements. Today, people are willing to use YouTube as a babysitter and tablets as their kids' companions. Be it engaging games, interactive tools for education or workflow productivity, Technology always lends a helping hand but this gives rise to a few questions: Does technology really help us? Does technology need to disrupt everything? How deep into our personal affairs should we let technology creep?

Far Less Secure than In-Person

Lack of personal appearance defeats the purpose of notarization. Period. How can a notary properly identify someone in the world of AI when they appear on a computer screen? Audio/Video can be made from anywhere through any means. As I write this article, I did a simple Google search for "Deepfake Video" and about 152 Million results popped up with detailed instructions.

Huge Potential for Fraud

Here's the dirty secret that online notaries don't want you to know. Online notary companies require you to upload a copy of your documents so that they can place their seal on them, you then download your "notarized" documents and print them out. But guess what? Now a copy of your most important legal documents is now somewhere on the online notary platform’s data warehouse just waiting for a hacker to harvest them. And we all hear the same news story almost weekly, "XYZ Company has been hacked and millions of users sensitive data was compromised."

Huge Potential for Identity Theft

Internet security is another big one. If you don't have huge secure data servers processing the data you're uploading to the online notary platform, your personal information including your ID credentials and legal documents are being thrown out onto the World Wide Web without recourse. Once that data is internet bound, there is no coming back from a potential cyber attack.

It Costs More

In the State of California, notaries may charge a fee of $15 per signature notarized. Online notaries charge almost twice that at $25 per signature notarized. If you have multiple documents with multiple signers, you're going to spend a whole lot more with an online notary than with a local notary whom you actually get to meet in person and shake hands with. "Shop Local" also applies to notaries.

You Might Need a Do-Over

The receiving party may not accept an out of state notary seal. A little known fact is that it's up to the receiving party to decide if they will accept the notarization or not. Online notaries don’t exist in all states at the moment and the receiving party doesn't have to accept an out of state seal, particularly if the receiving party is a governmental agency. You'll then need to spend more money and time having your document re-notarized by a local notary in your home state.

Unemployment

How are local notaries supposed to make a living? Currently, there are approximately 165,000 notaries in California. Now, we have a huge corporate company coming into CA (with the infrastructure already in place) and swallowing up notary jobs leaving thousands without work. Imagine how hard it will be to find a notary once notaries have been replaced by an app but you can't get an internet connection. For the Notary, RON is very much like what the ATM was for the Bank Teller.

Conclusion

Technology has brought radical changes to our lives. But we will end up having more disadvantages than advantages if our society overuses technology. Question? Comment? Something to add? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

Should states legalize remote online notarization with today’s ongoing issues surrounding data preservation, enforceability, liability, evidentiary access, and reliability and in doing so, potentially threaten the integrity of a key anti-fraud mechanism in our legal system?

Documents notarized traditionally have robust evidentiary value. Rather than providing similar assurances of evidentiary reliability for online notarization, this technology leaves serious issues of long-term data retention, liability, security, evidentiary reliability and accessibility, and data privacy unaddressed. Ultimately, without tackling these crucial issues, remote online notarization may be endangering the integrity of document authentication and retention practices by prioritizing short-term convenience over proven in-person fraud prevention.

The purpose of the notarial system is not efficiency. Its purpose is to help ensure the validity of signatures used to document certain vital, life-altering transactions and events, such as real estate transactions, the granting of powers of attorney, and the creation of advance health care directives. These events and transactions occur in most people’s lives at least once. And lawsuits challenging the legality of these transactions and events regularly turn to proof that a signature was, or was not, validly notarized. To make significant changes in today’s notary laws will have significant implications for our civil justice system, and should be undertaken with caution and the utmost care. The fundamental premise is that states should act cautiously in order to ensure and require that the evidentiary reliability of online notarization is at least equal to, if not better than, traditional in-person notarization.

What happens to notarized data if a notary platform were to go out of business without first securing or transferring data; if data were corrupted, or if data were lost? What happens if one of these companies goes out of business? Notarize, one of the leading platforms and supporter of RON, runs its remote online notary service on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS provides robust backup services and is a popular option for many leading Internet companies. But what would happen if Notarize ran out of money and was unable to pay its AWS bills? Would the records of the notarizations that it facilitated disappear for good? What would litigants do if they needed records of one of these notarizations? Likewise, what would happen if AWS were hacked and data were corrupted or stolen? And what if other online notary services use systems that are less robust and simply abandoned their businesses? Our present system relies on thousands of private notaries public to safeguard and maintain their journals. But a single lost notary journal imperils the records of, at most, a few hundred transactions. How many records could be lost if one of the platform companies failed? How many transactions could that imperil? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? This could be extremely detrimental and costly for consumers and businesses all over the globe.

Ultimately, states should consider whether the present notarial system is so broken that they cannot take adequate time to ensure that this technology implements an online system that is at least if not more robust and reliable as our current system for decades to come.

….documents. Training your brain to write the correct date when a new year begins is always a hassle. This year, however, is particularly challenging. You must be diligent because writing the 2-digit form of the year “2020” on a document could potentially leave you vulnerable to changed dates.

For most people in recent years when writing out dates they typically shorten the year, such as abbreviating “December 6, 2019” as “12-6-19.” This month many regulatory agencies have pointed out that if the year 2020 is shortened to just “20” when dating a document, a nefarious individual could write in additional numbers later to alter the date of execution. For example, the date “1-28-20” could be:

• Backdated by adding the number 17 at the end, changing the date to “1-28-2017”

• Post-dated by adding a “21” at the end, changing the date to “1-28-2021”

To avoid potential issues, the best practice in the new decade is to write out the full year as “2020” when signing most documents or dating any other important records.

A Notary Public is an official of integrity appointed by state government —typically by the secretary of state — to serve the public as an impartial witness in performing a variety of official fraud-deterrent acts related to the signing of important documents. These official acts are called notarizations, or notarial acts. Notaries are publicly commissioned as “ministerial” officials, meaning that they are expected to follow written rules without the exercise of significant personal discretion, as would otherwise be the case with a “judicial” official.
     
A Notary's duty is to screen the signers of important documents — such as property deeds, wills, and powers of attorney — for their true identity, their willingness to sign without duress or intimidation, and their awareness of the contents of the document or transaction. Some notarizations also require the Notary to put the signer under an oath, declaring under penalty of perjury that the information contained in a document is true and correct.

Impartiality is the foundation of the Notary's public trust. They are duty-bound not to act in situations where they have a personal interest. The public trusts that the Notary’s screening tasks have not been corrupted by self-interest. And impartiality dictates that a Notary never refuses to serve a person due to race, nationality, religion, politics, sexual orientation or status as a non-customer.

As official representatives of the state, Notaries Public certify the proper execution of many of the life-changing documents of private citizens — whether those diverse transactions convey real estate, grant powers of attorney, establish a prenuptial agreement, or perform the multitude of other activities that enable our civil society to function.

To find a notary in your area, do an internet search for “notary public” and the names of your city and state.