There's an interesting downside to naming your child something very unique- you become significantly more Google-able than "Tom Jones". Potential employers, landlords, spouses, and other people will have a very easy time seeing all of your failures and folly.
THIS. I have a unique last name - there is absolutely no ambiguity whenever anything shows up.
Whenever a website (or anything offline that might put rankings or whatever online) wants me to use my real name, I usually default to "Alex", "Alex M/MJ" or "Alex (gibberish)" depending on their guidelines. What they view as a policy that "encourages openness", I view as something that will guide first impressions when people google me unto eternity.
Even if it's not controversial, it's the first thing a potential client or employer sees when they type things into google, and I don't want to be reckless with that. I don't want to have to view every minor action that I make on a website as something that's potentially going to be on the front page of google's results for my name.
When I was in HS, my friends had a poker league, and we all had nicknames and personas - someone put up a page with hilarious (but decidedly unprofessional) caricatures and quotes and it was the first thing that showed up under my name. I noticed it and asked my friend to change it, which he though was hilarious but understood and did.
Same for Meetup. A long time ago I went to some meetups that could potentially be alienating to some folks (agnostics and whatever, way back in the day when I felt it was worth arguing about) and BOOM, google front page for my name. If I had a client who was somewhat religious, I don't care at all but I don't want that to show up and all of a sudden I'm accidentally alienating people. For showing up to something.
Whenever I run a 5k or do anything remotely prestigious I always use my full name so that the front page of google just gets filled with that kind of thing in case anything else that's potentially a liability pops up and I don't notice it. It's annoying.
I am absolutely delighted that my name is sufficiently unique (and my online presence sufficiently diverse) that the entire first page of Google results that shows up is me.
>I don't want to have to view every minor action that I make on a website as something that's potentially going to be on the front page of google's results for my name.
It's true that I try to make every post to the Internet be something that I wouldn't worry about showing up in such a search.
But as a result, when people find me, they do have a lot of real data about me -- and I get job offers and consulting offers all the time.
I do not think it's a bad thing to be able to be Googled; what's a bad thing is to let yourself be a jerk online -- and it's important to Google yourself from time to time to see if something like your friend's page is showing up.
The Meetup point is a good one, though. It would be nice to be able to (optionally) conceal your presence in a Meetup. Be it related to atheism or religion or sexual orientation or recovering alcoholism or even stamp collecting or trainspotting, there are a lot of groups that one might want to join that they wouldn't necessarily want to shout about to everyone. And that's not the fault of having a unique name -- anyone in any Meetup group that I'm in will certainly be able to "out" me as a member of any other Meetup group that I'm a member of, even if I'm named John Smith. And it's entirely likely that I'll share professional Meetup groups with potential employers.
As a counterpoint, I run web forums and at times have encountered trolls. When they've been banned (at the behest of the vast majority of the community) some of them have made me their target.
Aside from death threats (which I dismiss as joking), I've been signed up to hundreds of porn and adult mailing lists and sites, I've had reports of my photo and vague details being used on lots of "m4m" casual sex adverts, and I've had the "here's a streetview of where you live, we know where you live" type intimidation.
I'm really glad that the efforts of a few trolls doesn't really show on Google because my name is fairly common and there are some people who share the name who have achieved some fame or popularity. The result of the top-ranking stuff means the work of the trolls is nowhere to be seen.
If I had a unique name I've no doubt that it would have been trashed thanks to other people.
My point is simply: You may think you are in control of your online identity, but you are not.
Sorry you've been harassed like that. I agree that I would have a hard time dealing with that kind of situation.
I think having a strong web presence myself means that the work of any would-be trolls would struggle to make it onto the front page -- though I do ask that would-be trolls reading this not try to prove me wrong, thank you. :)
That's fine if you have insanely high PageRank. If some jackass with considerably higher PR decides to troll you, there's pretty much nothing you can do about it.
> I do not think it's a bad thing to be able to be Googled; what's a bad thing is to let yourself be a jerk online
Ehhh, it's not always that.
For awhile I was big into writing speculative/science fiction on a popular writing site. Years later after reading some of my submissions I have to say I'm extremely happy that they were done under a pseudonym :)
My favorite local video store (quaint, I know) organizes films by director and it's always encouraging to walk through there and see that even great directors sometimes make terrible movies.
I've read it. I have a copy of the PDF on my hard drive.
I called out Meetup's policy explicitly as a privacy problem, and I'm not arguing for reduced overall privacy over any aspect of someone's life they decide they'd prefer to keep private.
What exactly did you mean for me to learn from reading that paper?
From what I read of that document, he says "People have these arguments against privacy, but they're wrong." But I get to the end of the article, and it never seemed to me that he really fleshed out the "why."
I still think it's right to support privacy. But I'm not arguing against a right to privacy. I'm arguing that if I want to put my name out there, I should be able to.
I'm confused why my right to want to promote myself on the Internet is being questioned (and downvoted above!!) on HN of all places.
If you have nothing to hide it's fine. Well it's not. Stalkers and bullies love to find informations wether it's shameful or not. It makes their task easier.
This argument proves too much. Living your life normally, in general, helps stalkers and bullies. The only thing that doesn't "help" them (in one way) is making your own life more difficult for their sake... which "helps" them more directly, by making them feel acknowledged and dominant.
People should not have to compensate for the actions of broken people. Celebrities know how to be functional in this situation: share everything, and get restraining orders.
> "People should not have to compensate for the actions of broken people."
Right... I shouldn't have to lock my door, I shouldn't have to avoid dark alleys, I should be able to carry as much cash as I please... but I live in an unjust reality in which it is frequently prudent to take basic precautions.
I looked into getting a restraining order once, after a petty argument online (before I learned better and began using pseudonyms while discussing anything of interest) turned extremely sour. Turns out that since I was never in a sexual relationship with the other person, the state I was currently living in limited my options to "suck it up", or "get a CCW". The general concept of a restraining order is not universally recognized.
(Furthermore, restraining orders are not preventive, they only provide a form of retaliation after the fact. They won't stop somebody from hiding in a bush outside your front door, they'll just allow you to have the police slap them with a restraining order violation after you discover them in your bush. Appealing to restraining orders to protect you is like appealing to burglary laws to protect you. You still need to lock up your home...)
I know people in reality sometimes have to of course, which is why I am not for real name policies. But I do want the problems to be fixed properly if possible.
Out of curiosity, what sites would you say have been constructive?
My intuition is that StackExchange would probably be good if you're knowledgeable in esoteric/lucrative fields, whereas most people probably don't use their real name on reddit (depending on the subreddit, perhaps), but I'm interested to hear your experience.
I'm on StackExchange, yes. I've also posted to forums that cover my field expertise where I (at least used to) answer a lot a questions.
Honestly I don't know how people find me. I just state my opinions often on the topics I care about. And at least some of the time people respond favorably to those opinions.
I don't mind a bit of both worlds on this.. my real name is pretty common, not so common that you could never find me with my real name, but on the flip side, my alias is pretty specific to me... if you search for my first or last name, with my online handle, you're pretty likely to find me.
Most of the first page of google results for my alias are me... combined with my name, you get even more. I think adopting an online alias is kind of important, but then again, I started off in the BBS days with dialup boards that were pretty much all local to you.
I have a friend who has the dubious honor of sharing a name with a convicted murderer who was executed in Texas a few years ago.
I asked him about how he thinks that has effected him. His take is that although it might turn off some brain-dead HR people, since there is no actual ambiguity (he surely is not an executed person) it hasn't negatively impacted him too much but it does push all the relevant links off the first few google results pages unless he actively does SEO stuff to correct it. He asserts that it gives him a good deal of control over what google shows for his name.
I've taken a similar approach to online pseudonyms. Any work that I don't intend to be attached to my 'meatspace' identity is done under names that will return irrelevant results when googled, making it difficult to find my other accounts that may have the same pseudonym on other sites.
Trying to fly under the radar, as you do, may be some solution, but it makes the mistakes like this one stick out even more boldly.
I've found that over the years, there's enough of a heap on the web that matches my name, that garbage like you mention is overwhelmed by the more meaningful stuff. A search for me typically turns up my LinkedIn profile, the product page on Amazon for a book I co-authored, some CodeProject articles, and stuff like that.
Just having a life's worth of stuff out there lets a smart search engine ignore much of the stuff that I'd want them to ignore.
Hey, actually if you ready to spend some time, there is a way to solve your problem. The algorithm is simple -- add noise. Create multiple virtual identities with first/last name. Then instantiate these identities in social networks, forums, mailing lists, etc. Link corresponding accounts together to raise their search ranking. Bam! You're not longer visible on first page of google search results.
While security through obscurity wont work against a sophisticated opponent, its enough to prevent casual snooping.
I have a very uncommon last name and relatively uncommon first name. Still, there are three people on the internet with my name. We're all within two years of each other in age. One even lives in the state I grew up in. Put us all together and there's not a demographic we can't offend in some way.
And having an unusual name can also make you run afoul of Google+'s "no unusual name" policy, where accounts get blocked just because someone at Google thinks it can't be a real name (they're often wrong).
Facebook also has a "no unusual name" policy, but it's very randomly enforced.
My friend's first name is "Spider." It is not her birth name, but she's used it professionally and personally her entire adult life.
When she signed up for Facebook they told her she couldn't be "Spider" because somebody (Sony probably) decided that wasn't a "real" name (Spider Robinson and Spider Sabich notwithstanding.) If she wanted to use "Spider" Facebook needed a legal ID with that name on it (which she does not have.)
So she registered under "Spidie" instead with no further problems.
I would recommend that parents encourage their children to use a variety of usernames on the major social platforms, none of which are related to their legal name.
I'm in the process of transitioning to a single username everywhere based on the domain ngp.io, which itself is essentially "[my intials] I/O". I like the elegance and conciseness of it. But I'm extremely glad that I didn't do something like this earlier. My childhood online (as well as my "online childhood", if you catch my meaning) remain obscure to all but those with the necessary time, resources and motivation.
That's surprisingly powerful when you're surrounded by swarms of people whose entire histories can be looked up in a matter of minutes.
It can also be damning; I'm reminded of the line in Mad Men referring to Don Draper, "He has no people! You can't trust a person like that." Being the mysterious man from out of town might be alluring from a sexual stance, but business-wise it's still difficult to advance without strong geographically-rooted social networks, and the first step to creating those nowadays is often glancing at someone's Facebook or Twitter and exclaiming "hey, I know that person too!" Personhood is partially defined by your connection to other people, so having a visible interpersonal history is, in a sense, required for passing the Turing tests you're subjected to by those around you. Gaps in your history, on purpose or by accident, can result in being treated like a subhuman.
No, but that doesn't imply that it shouldn't hold true for the entirety of the child's legal childhood.
There's always been a feature of childhood that I feel is paramount: the freedom to alter one's identity. The child is still in beta; they're a person that's not officially released to the public.
Forcing them, from the start, to stick a single identity can be problematic psychologically and socially.
Encouraging situational pseudonymity is not equal to the revocation of one's legal identity, from now until death.
I can say with certainty that, had I not had the benefits of pseudonymity offered by the internet of the 90s and 00s, I would be a fundamentally broken person.
The assumption that this "freedom" remain available in the future is what I challenged, not a social obligation not to avail yourself of it. It may become technically or legally impossible to operate under a pseudonym or to change your legal name in the future. If you give your child a unique name, and the ability to operate under a different name is not available, then you've guaranteed their activity (childhood or otherwise) is easily cataloged and searchable.
> And if it becomes technically or illegally impossible to operate under a pseudonym or to change your legal name in 10 years? That this won't happen is the assumption I challenged, not some social obligation not to choose to use a pseudonym.
Then we should work to make that future unlikely. Even if things come to be as you describe, we should build in strict social/technical safeguards of (at the very least) pseudonymity until we much better understand the development the human mind.
[edit in response to your edited post] It seems we're pretty much in agreement, just coming at the issue from different points of devil's advocacy.
One of the social safeguards for preserving pseudonymity (your advice) in the face of a future you cannot control is giving your child a common name, so that their activity cannot easily be discerned from that of many others. As hard as you work, you may not be able to prevent future technical and legal changes from occurring.
> One of the social safeguards for preserving pseudonymity (your advice) in the face of a future you cannot control is giving your child a common name, so that their activity cannot easily be discerned from that of many others.
I agree. I'm very grateful to have a common name. Nate Perkins is about as generic as it gets. Global searches for my name come up with a variety of people completely unrelated to me.
Still, there are potential downsides. For instance, searching for "[my name] [my city]" brings up a mugshot of someone who isn't me. And of course, Stephen Law of the original post has a much more frustrating issue.
None of us are really in a position to say with certainty "it's better to have a common name than an uncommon one" or vice versa.
I would argue that pseudonymity is necessary to overcome negative situations arising from having a common name or having an uncommon name. But this argument is strictly from my own experience and should be taken as such.
Like most things, it comes down to the importance of teaching kids to think critically about how their choices will affect themselves and their environment rather than accepting truisms not backed by relevant statistics.
I think your sentiments and insights here are echoed in a longstanding practice in American law where minors are referred to by their initials only in case names and opinions (for example, New Jersey v. T.L.O.).
I always considered this to be an upside. Being googlable always felt to me like a synonym to existing; it's a way for potential employers to see that I know stuff because of all the texts and hobby projects; for potential future spouses/other people to see that I'm an interesting person who does something creative, etc.
Funny how I didn't notice when being easily googlable started to be considered a bad thing.
I'm not sure. I've been lucky enough to not have to worry about it, but I've definitely seen it (mostly of the "stalker" variety) and can easily understand why someone would want to remain on the "down low".
I don't mean to pile on you personally, but this issue always pushes my buttons. It seems like whenever it comes up, there's always those who are absolutely incredulous that anyone wouldn't want to be all over the internet. Worse, I've even seen the reaction where some people think that it means the person must be untrustworthy, as if they are the ones who did something wrong.
If someone wants to be all over the front page of Google when someone searches their name, I think that's fine if that's what they want. Just don't assume that everyone wants (or should want) the same thing.
I enjoy the fact that my name, Josh Wright, is reasonably common. Even if you try to make it a bit more specific by adding the city I live in, Syracuse, I'm buried under results for a guy who used to play basketball for Syracuse University.
If they find you on linked in, they can google reverse image search your profile picture and probably come up with quite a bit. Now imagine google introducing facial recognition search.
