Record-keeping has been an essential element in the development of organized human societies.
"The practice of associating a date or even a time with an event or a document, also called “timestamping”, has its roots in the need to produce evidence to assert or confirm a right or an obligation during a dispute or litigation. Administrations often ask citizens to provide an extract of a birth certificate not older than three months. The reason for this request is not related to the birth as such, but to the person's status at the time of the request. Indeed, the birth certificate also mentions important events creating rights or obligations (marriage, divorce, civil partnership, guardianship, etc.). The affixing of the stamp and the date by a registrar on the extract provides this proof. But how do you verify the existence of electronic data? The digitization of entire sectors of economic activity has led to the need for electronic timestamping, to verify both timing and content. In many areas such as intellectual property, personal data protection and IT, it has become essential to prove the existence of specific data at a specific date and time.
In the absence of such proof, a person could be denied rights which are rightfully theirs and/or be wrongly penalised. However, electronic timestamping raises new questions, notably as to the reliability of the process. The debate on the probative value of emails is still recent. Everyone knows how easy it is to change the local time on a computer or a computer system. Consequently, a new law had to be introduced to regulate electronic timestamping systems and thus set certain technical requirements to guarantee their reliability as evidence."
