How can clicking on "I agree with ..." have any legal weight?

Question

Many times you have to agree with some conditions or terms on website by checking the "I agree" checkbox or clicking some button.

Or this - we are working on an agreement email for our client - our client sends email to their client with some kind of "I agree ..." checkbox to give our client approval to contact them and work with their credentials.

Both of these "approvals" can be faked very easily. When user clicks on confirmation url or checks some checkbox, it is just a request sent to our server and we then do something with the request. I can very easily just change directly the value in our database which can't be decided (in terms of law) whether did that user or a database programmer.

If you can't prove who "approved" that, how could it have any legal weight and everybody use it?

Answer 1

The fact that it is possible to engage in fraud, doesn't mean that it is impossible to prove something. Usually, in a civil action, testimony that a business record says something and that it was not falsified is sufficient to meet a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e. to establish to the satisfaction of a judge or jury that it is more likely that something is true than it is that it isn't true).

It is easy to forge checks too (and hard to prove that a signature is fake), but that doesn't mean that you can't prove payment by check or that negotiable instruments are useless.