25 ms·

For 18 years I thought she was stealing my identity, until I found her

289 points by zhte415 10y ago

seunosewa 10y ago
Could she maybe change her name?
- Markoff 10y ago
  that seem pretty unusual instead of trying to make police fix their systems
  - drivingmenuts 10y ago
    That would require a lawsuit the author most likely couldn't afford and most lawyers wouldn't touch unless there was a significant payday (or at least a recovery of expenses) involved. Even if she prevailed, there's no guarantee that the problem would be fixed in a reasonable time frame, or at all.
  - TwiztidK 10y ago
    If she changes her name it's easier, cheaper, faster, and more likely to actually happen. I agree that she shouldn't have to, but it is most likely the best solution.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    ...unusual? I could change my name for ~$100, new passport and license costs, and an aggravating amount of paperwork. I could convince the New York DMV to fix their record-keeping by... well, maybe if I convinced an influential politician to shame them for it. Maybe. I suppose I could devote years of my life to a public campaign about the issue. There's a chance that would work, though probably they'd just fix my file to shut me up and not fix the system. If your point is that this is insane, then yes, yes it is. But changing your name is almost certainly easier than convincing a large, high-bureaucracy state DMV to solve the problems they cause.
- wccrawford 10y ago
  She could try, but then there would be issues with that, I'm betting. Some way for it all to still affect her because it used to be her name, as well as dealing with issues from the name change.
- asveikau 10y ago
  Thought of that as well. I wonder how the DMV handles legal name changes. Wouldn't it be funny if the name change wound up renaming both Lisa Davises?
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Oh dear god, they might. I think either they'd start a new file, which would let you clear out even valid tickets assigned to you, or they'd rename their folder and then start a new one next time not-changed-Lisa-Davis got ticketed.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  She could, but it's a workaround to a problem that isn't hers, and the possibility of the same problem happening to someone else still exists (and there is likely many more instances). Lisa Davis is a perfectly fine name; she shouldn't have to change it for any reason.
- mjevans 10y ago
  In addition to the other reasons listed, it also probably wouldn't be unique enough. It seems that their records are keyed off of ONLY: * Birthdate * Last Name * First name If I were going to take the bother of changing my name I'd make the middle name, a part I can drop from most non-legal/contractual areas, the actual unique identifier. By which I mean I'd have the "middle name" be a short normal name post-fixed by a base26 encoded hash; I should probably also add 'son' at the end of that... say it's European...
  - dwighttk 10y ago
    It seems like middle initial was also used... she knew the other person was Lisa S Davis but had to figure out what her middle name was.
    - mjevans 10y ago
      Let's do some back of the envelope math: 04 bits = Middle initial (It's actually 5, but I imagine the common ones cluster) 10 bits = First Name 10 bits = Last Name 120 bits = 42 adult years (12*10): 3-years ~=1024 slots ~= 10 bits A naive approach might be to add all of these together, except that's unaware of the Birthday Paradox (aka Birthday Problem). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem The sets are larger, but even with the addition of those extra 4 bits there's still going to be overlap in a non-trivial population. When is there a "good" chance of a match in all of the fields that matter? What is a "good" chance? What is an acceptable collision? I think most sane people would agree that the final question is the important one. In matters that can derail someone's life and send them to jail an acceptable false positive rate is ZERO. Therefore answering the preceding questions is largely meaningless, we already have example proof of at least one failure, which is enough to declare the system inherently broken.
      - CodesInChaos 10y ago
        120 bits for the birth date is much too big. It's closer to 14 bits (taking your 42 year figure it's log2(42*365)=13.9).
Markoff 10y ago
i still don't understand why she in first place admitted guilt for something she didn't do? is this really common procedure to admit something you didn't do in US?
- panglott 10y ago
  False confessions are in fact pretty common. They're most common with juveniles and the mentally ill, for example, or when people are being interrogated for 12-16 hours straight and just need to leave, or when the police lie to suspects. http://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvictions/issues/falseconfessions/ http://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvicti... https://www.exonerationproject.org/resources/false-confessions/ https://www.exonerationproject.org/resources/false-confessio... The motives for such are pretty easy to see in her story. "In 2015, I failed a background check for a new job because, according to the NYPD, I hadn’t paid the ticket 'I' had gotten for walking in a park in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn after hours, at 10pm. Now there was a misdemeanor on my record, and I had 60 days to clear it up if I wanted to keep the job, which meant trekking to lower Manhattan to criminal court. ...I tried to explain the long history of mix-ups, but the judge wouldn’t listen. He told me I’d have to go to trial, which could take months. By that time the job would be long gone. ...The cop told me to go back in and plead guilty, and then I’d pay a fine and the judge would dismiss the charge and let me off with a warning." She believed the costs to pleading guilty would be lower than fighting the charge.
- macintux 10y ago
  The penalty for most small crimes is less onerous than the burden of fighting them.
  - lotyrin 10y ago
    Unfortunately, this is often true of larger crimes as well.
- rtkwe 10y ago
  The cost and bother of fighting such minor tickets, especially when the defense is kind of odd like this case, are both way beyond the small fines minor nuisance tickets like this have. Also she tried the first couple times this happened and didn't get anywhere with the judge in court (which isn't too surprising the courts that deal with those tickets have a huge number of cases to deal with every day) and she was able to get the tickets expunged through the system after pleading guilty.
jrpt 10y ago
No joke, this is happening to me right now with the SF MTA. I've already proved to them I don't own the car, but it seems like they didn't update their system last time, so I got another ticket for something I didn't do, at a place I've never been to in my life.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  This happened to a photography editor who sits in the cube across from me. He found out he had a ticket in Pittsburgh, a city he had never been to, when he tried to transfer his license to a new state. No lawyer would take the case either. He eventually went to an identity theft company, who took $400 and fixed the issue in three months. I use to work in Identity Management at a major university. A number of people came through our systems without SSNs. We had a complicated set of rules to make sure we didn't provision two accounts. We'd check if the names were reversed and we'd check both the month/date = date/month on the date of birth (people from other countries might enter it backwards without thinking about it). We even had rules for SSNs that were off by <2 digits with similar names. Every morning we'd have a set of "manual provisions" we'd have to stop and check. Occasionally duplicate accounts get created and we'd have to go through a big manual process of combining them and telling them "You need to use this account; forget about the other one. It no longer exists," and get their stuff synced across all AD domains (Universities typically have several). What surprises me about this article is the NYC system doesn't use the SSN (which is good in a sense, it should never be used as a identification number, see the latest GCP Greg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus). The idea of an identity and criminal record us that follows us digitally is a very new concept, one that didn't exist 150+ years ago; or at least no where near the complexity it does today. Immigration was also treated very differently. Most of are criminal background procedures in the US are plagued with problems like this; which is why most counties require fingerprint/criminal checks for immigration screenings. Today, the idea of a national identification number is highly opposed in the United States. In some ways I favour this as I feel digital identities lead to a situation where people cannot escape their pasts. But it also means people use absolutely terrible ways to associate people such as name and birthday; totally non-unique fields that should never be used to identify people. SSNs offer no real security; no photos and your number +1/-1 is most likely a valid SSN of someone who was born the same day as you.
ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
This is awful on so many levels, but the worst part is the pettiness of the reasons for the fines.
- nkoren 10y ago
  That's what struck me too. As a white person, it has never once occurred to me that I might get fined for walking around after 10pm. Because I never would be.
  - moftz 10y ago
    The fine was for walking through a park that closes after 10pm. They use this to prevent people from sleeping in the park at night or doing other things like prostitution and drug use in the cover of darkness. There was a city park across from my dorm in college. The park had clearly visible no trespassing after 10pm signs. We would still walk through since it was the quickest route but cops were quick to pull up and give anyone a warning. I only ever heard of people getting tickets when they were doing stuff like underaged drinking and smoking weed in the park at night.
    - bilbo0s 10y ago
      Just wondering... are you black? This is a serious question. I was not trying to be snarky, just trying to determine just how different things are if you are, say, a young black guy breaking a minor rule like that. I know the consequences are definitely different in Chicago if you are black, but I was wondering if things are better in other places in the US. (Given the contents of the article, I realize NYC is similar to Chicago, I guess I was assuming you live in another area of the country?)
    - SamBam 10y ago
      > We would still walk through since it was the quickest route but cops were quick to pull up and give anyone a warning. Exactly. If you are white, then this seems to support the parent comment's statement.
joshfraser 10y ago
Good reminder for developers to never treat a name or name/birthdate combo as a reliable primary key.
- snowpanda 10y ago
  On a related note. You'd be surprised how common this is in the healthcare industry. An industry where mistakes can be deadly.
  - pmarreck 10y ago
    No technical clusterfuck in the healthcare industry seems to surprise me anymore All the technical problems are already solved, but as usual, it's politics and people and profit standing in the way
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    You'd also be surprised how often the patient is trying to mislead. Immigration status, serious mental health issues and being wanted by the police are the three that have hit me (that I known of). It's particularly hard when there is intent to deceive.
- vinhboy 10y ago
  If any facebook developer is here today.. > She didn’t have the Facebook Messenger app; she’d never seen my messages. For goodness sake, fix this. This is a HUGE UX BUG in facebook. I've gotten plenty of important "hidden" messages from people through facebook. Don't let people send messages if you aren't going to show them to the receiver. This is a huge problem.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    I believe that if you don't have the app, Facebook sends you an email saying you have new Messenger message. I've never used Messenger, and this has happened to me.
    - 10y ago
moftz 10y ago
Why isn't the NYPD and DMV using the driver's license number for ID? It's a unique number and can help avoid situations like this. I would understand the confusion when the perpetrator of the crime doesn't have a license and they just provide a name, DOB, and address but some of these tickets were for people that have a license. It seems like using the license number for ID is a no brainer.
- joekrill 10y ago
  Maybe it isn't legal? I'm pretty sure there is a law preventing use of social security numbers for some things, so there may be something similar happening here. I don't really know, and I'd also guess something like that would vary by state.
  - rohmish 10y ago
    I really don't understand US's use of SSN. You people treat it as a secret while it isn't. Now this is a place while something like SSN would've helped but NYPD still uses the old name+D.O.B. combination for checks. US is basically using a very insecure method of national identity. Maybe US should just go ahead and implement a real National Identity Program now.
    - theandrewbailey 10y ago
      Any move to make an official national identity program in the USA is demonized and shot on sight, no matter if it brings to light the crappy system around SSNs. A true solution would have to be usable by private industry as well. If it were up to me, it would essentially be x509 (because today, you're trusting the state and the person presenting the SSN), but people lose important shit, even proof of identity, all the time.
      - Muromec 10y ago
        That's kind of how it works in Europe - state keeps the records and assigns you a number (citizen Id, tax Id whatever), and you can use x509, possibly from private providers, to prove that it's you. Obviously that Id can't be kept secret. In Ukraine we even have an opt out for crazy Russian churchgoers who believe, that having id is literally selling their soul - they just use passport number in their x509 certs.
Keverw 10y ago
> I had to plead guilty and pay the fine to restore my license, then try to repeal the guilty plea at traffic court. Having to admit guilty when you didn't do it? What kind of system is that? Sounds like you are guilty until proven innocent in that case... instead of the other way around.
- wmil 10y ago
  It could be a bad system or just bad legal advice. She should have at least been able to plead 'no contest'.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Depends on jurisdiction and charge. Sometimes no contest isn't on the menu.
- waisbrot 10y ago
  The issue is that she wanted to be able to drive before a (possibly months away) court date. Or that she wanted a job that needed her record clean within a week. "Presumed innocent" means that at the _end_ of the trial, if the prosecution has not made their case then you are free. But in the time between being charged and the end of your trial you are not innocent. The court will suspend or revoke your license until after trial, you'll have all the charges on your record until after trial, and you can be held in prison until the trial is resolved. In all these cases, you will probably not get any compensation when it turns out that you were innocent, and meanwhile you may have been fired from work and had your property confiscated for non-payment of bills.
  - emn13 10y ago
    The US justice system is a farce. Because let's be honest, there's precious little to motivate for law enforcement, prosecutors and judges to actually process your case quickly; and indeed there are various incentives to convict possibly innocent parties. Similarly; there are virtually no incentives for law enforcement to do no harm; nor are there any meaningful protections against abuse of power. It is more common for police to do the punishing than courts at this point - which begs the question whether the very existence of a criminal court doesn't do more harm than good at this point; for by having such a facade of impartiality it becomes much easier to excuse lack of oversight, accountability and proportionality on the enforcement side. Sure; it could be even worse. But is it too much to ask for at least some kind of self-corrective measure to be built into the system?
Zelphyr 10y ago
Seems like one solution would've been to legally change her name to "Lisa Xhkuwbiyt" (pronounced "Lisa Davis") since the legal records system in NY is so dumb.
- nkrisc 10y ago
  "It's spelled Raymond Luxury Yacht but it's pronounced Throat Warbler Mangrove."
nkrisc 10y ago
Maybe I'm just naïve but shouldn't the burden of proof be on the city to prove she's the person that was ticketed? A name and birthdate are not proof of anything.
- waisbrot 10y ago
  The judge is the one who determines what's "proof". In the story, he decided that name & birthdate was enough to not dismiss the case. She could have hired a lawyer and spent time fighting the case and maybe won, but she wanted to get it resolved immediately and a guilty plea is the only way to do that.
- eximius 10y ago
  For crimes, yes. That would probably have to happen at trial though. For traffic infractions, probably not.
- BearGoesChirp 10y ago
  City wants money. If it isn't this person, then the chance of them getting money goes way down. So they have a perverse incentive to force this person to pay, regardless if it is them or not, as long as the person isn't willing to fight a legal battle that ends up costing more money (if few enough people fight the legal battle, it may be more profitable to let them win their fights and keep charging all the people who don't fight). This is the problem letting the same the same entity that decides a punishment benefit from that punishment.
- anywhichway 10y ago
  The author breezed over a potentially important part: > I had never been to any other kind of court except traffic court (at which, both times, the police officers had flat-out lied). Reading into that it sounds like they had name, birthday, and the issuing officer saying, "yes, that was her". If the officers can't reliably witness they shouldn't be a part of the process. There should be enough records taken at the time of the ticket that the officers unreliable testimony shouldn't be needed or used.
  - 10y ago
justanother 10y ago
It isn't just police. I have a somewhat common American name. A bank once opened a signature loan for one of my 4 or so same-state doppelgangers and sent me the payment coupons. One of the doppelgangers is a felon, which sucks for background checks and also because I love to travel and therefore always end up with an 'X' from the APC kiosk. Post-Trump, this means about an hour of detention in Miami while a lady questions me in Spanish until finally they realize we have different birthdays and physical descriptions. They told me it would stop if I got Global Entry. It didn't. This could all be prevented. These organizations are just flat-out negligent and don't care.
- toyg 10y ago
  It's a case of bad incentives: nobody is going to lose his job because they harass you, but somebody is going to suffer if a felon somehow goes through unmolested and then proceeds to do something that local newspapers might report.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I also have a common name. I was once called to the principal's office, where I, confused, started to receive a lecture. THEY: <confusing nonsense> I: What are you talking about? THEY: You know what I'm talking about. Don't play dumb. I: (after 10 seconds of thought) How many people named $NAME attend this school? THEY: <checking records> THEY: ... Two. Get back to class! Now! No apology. No sign of contrition. They acted like it was my fault that they screwed up. If it had ever happened more than once, I certainly would have raised some hell over it. They truly do not care. If there is a problem, it is your fault, for being an inconveniently irregular person. I shudder to think at how many of us would be inconvenienced if any one of the other people than share my name and birthdate were disreputable or notorious among certain government agencies. Anecdotally, municipal and circuit court judges could care less about whether you get treated fairly or not, so long as your case does not make their job even one iota more difficult. You could do 110% of their work for them, and they still might rule capriciously, telling you to appeal if you don't like it. The thing that pissed me off most about the article was the innocent party pleading guilty and paying fines. It made me want to leap through my screen and scream at her in person.
Banthum 10y ago
The author really does seem to think of black people as children who can't possibly be held accountable for anything they've done. What must it be like to be on the receiving end of such paternalism? It sounds awful. And horrifically damaging. If people tell you every day that you can't win, and you have no responsibility for bad decisions you make, how can you possibly succeed after such a psych-war campaign to make you into a control-externalizing mental infant? I'd hate my parents forever if they did this to me. She meets her black name-sharer who reveals that she is, surprise, a single mother with three kids (who she bore very young), while the author stayed married and had kids late. News flash: Blacks who simply wait to have kids and have them when married and stay married are overwhelmingly not in poverty. Meanwhile, whites who fail to do these things are very often in poverty. No racist white person is forcing anyone to have kids in their teenage years, from multiple men, and fail to marry. These are personal decisions, and bad decisions have bad consequences for people of any race. And then they sit around talking about "the utter ridiculousness of upper-middle-class white people". Yes, so ridiculous, not having kids out of wedlock, and forming stable social arrangements. And "the intense differences between Brownsville and Park Slope, very different Brooklyn neighborhoods but both suffering from a severe lack of diversity.". Yes, I'm sure those white neighborhoods are really "suffering" because there are too many whites. Must be a nightmare. She literally calls it a "version of justice" when black people give false information to police to avoid tickets for public violence: "Now I understood why the tickets were never paid: most of these Lisa Davises had, in some way, disappeared. They had given fake addresses or moved, and they were skirting the law – their own version of justice – however they could." Yes, there is racism against blacks. No, that doesn't mean black are morally-perfect shining hearts of goodness whose every action is perfect. People are people; the way this author wipes away the individual to make everyone simply a piece of their group, the way she excuses any action from someone in a victim class, is kind of horrifying. And it is racism.
- maehwasu 10y ago
  "The more I listened to her story, the more I realized that, all this time, Lisa wasn’t trying to steal my identity. She was trying to find her own." Agree--the whole article has a very bizarre "I got a new pet, and sometimes she pees on the rug, but she's just a puppy!" feeling.
ghaff 10y ago
This is obviously a fairly extreme case where enough identifiers match (as well as rough location) that supposedly unique official records aren't in fact unique. But, even outside of official records, I often wonder how many issues there are these days where someone with a relatively unusual name happens to share that name with someone with a prominent web profile. And that person could plausibly be them (for reasons of age, location, occupation) and have some background that would give potential employers, dates, etc. serious pause. In pre-web days, I knew someone in NYC who shared a name with someone who was notorious (and widely hated) in New York sports circles. My acquaintance literally got death threats on his home answering machine.
- nraynaud 10y ago
  well, in a 300 million inhabitants country, maybe it's time to think about serious unique identifiers. Countries way smaller than that did it.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    Yeah, the whole tattoos-on-arms thing has some deep stigma attached to it and that's not going to be overcome easily.
    - nraynaud 10y ago
      Even Israel has a unique numbering system.
      - lostlogin 10y ago
        Yes, but to be truely useful its needs to be with the person and accessible if they aren't conscious. How do you do that?
  - ghaff 10y ago
    You could argue the US already comes close to it given SSN and driver's license numbers. But coming right out and having an official permanent identity number just gives a lot of people the willies. Heck, a handful of states won't even adopt REAL ID to better standardize driver's licenses. I'm not sure I even disagree. Even if the practical effect (for good or ill) is negligible in most cases, it starts to tread a bit too close to "your papers please" and standardized tracking across all systems. Some inefficiency and ambiguity isn't always a bad thing.
matmann2001 10y ago
Pretty much the same thing happened to me just a few weeks ago. I found out someone used my insurance info to pay for their emergency room visit. After much amateur sleuth-work, I came to find that the person had the exact same name and birth date, and the hospital had messed up the insurance lookup. Of course, when I called the hospital to resolve the situation, and provided a copy of my license to prove my identity, they admitted they made a mistake. And two weeks later, they used to the address from my license to send me the hospital bill.
- fencepost 10y ago
  Perhaps you need to look at this differently and address it with someone other than the billing department. "Two weeks later they used the address from my license to illegally send me someone else's PHI." If calling the hospital and asking to talk to someone "Because you sent me someone else's medical information" doesn't get their attention, ask them about their breach notification procedures. edit: phrasing
  - matmann2001 10y ago
    I honestly don't think anyone that I'd be able to talk to on the phone there cares. Between the 4 or 5 people they passed me around to, I was given info about this other person that they had no right to give out. And that's the lesson here. Customer support representatives are so far removed from positions where they can actually be helpful, that all they are able to provide anymore is apathy and canned responses.
    - fencepost 10y ago
      That's why I phrased it as I did. I'm pretty sure that by sending his bills (presumably containing information on procedures performed, ICD10 detailed diagnosis codes, etc.) this could be considered a breach. Obviously it covers fewer than 500 individuals and the matching names is a complicating factor, but I believe that they're still required to report it to HHS within the first 2 months of 2018, and to notify the other person. Assuming that their training is worth anything at all, getting a supervisor and saying "I believe there's been a HIPAA violation and I need to know who to talk to" should get IMMEDIATE attention - it goes beyond application of a clue-by-four and should immediately get you connected to their Compliance Officer. That person should have all sorts of motivation to get things straightened out so it's not an ongoing breach with further disclosures post-notification. The other kicker is that I believe the rules changed recently such that if an individual reports a breach and it results in fines, that individual may now receive part of the penalty amount (caveat: I didn't find a citation for this, just have heard it discussed somewhere). My guess is that in your case with a matching name it's unlikely that there'd be anything like that, but just the prospect of the headaches involved should motivate people to resolve the situation.
andrewclunn 10y ago
Suddenly those eccentric people with really unusual names don't seem so crazy...
syphilis2 10y ago
I enjoyed the dig at Facebook Messenger. A few years back I was cleaning up my Facebook account and I stumbled across all of my received messages (mail? Not the same thing as Messenger). I was surprised because there were hundreds of them and I had never seen any of them before. People had responded to my marketplace listings, wanted to get lunch, asked about my pages, accepted an interview application, all kind of useful things hidden away from my view for half a decade.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
  Something similar happened to me with regular Facebook messages. Facebook, to combat spam, decided to introduce the concept of folders for messages. Besides the regular folder for messages from friends, there was ”Others“ into which all other messages were put. The UI didn’t make it very prominent and I learned about the Others folder only when I read an article about how someone missed appointments for job applications, invitations and messages from acquaintances because Facebook sorted these messages into the Others folder. Back then this happened quietly, without notification of the user. I checked my Others folder and found years old messages. Insane. All the missed opportunities and trouble that was caused for millions of people because Facebook intervened in their communication. I think Facebook now at least informs the user if they received a message from a non-friended person. Took them a long time.
noonespecial 10y ago
I spent 7 years basically unable to get credit because I owed $180k on a tractor in Kansas. I had never been to Kansas. Someone had transposed the last 2 digits of a SSN. It was nobody's job to fix it.
- saghm 10y ago
  I didn't even know that tractors cost $180k! I just assumed they cost around the same as a car
  - noonespecial 10y ago
    The tractor (technically some sort of 'harvester') had cost around $700k. The farmer had stopped paying (probably went bankrupt) and still owed $180k. I was a 19yo, freshly back to the US from Germany (I had been there since I was 11) and suddenly found I was unable to obtain any sort of credit (like getting a phone, electricity, an apartment etc.) Everyone involved could easily see what happened. And no one could fix it.
  - influx 10y ago
    Try a combine: http://www.news-gazette.com/news/business/2014-11-02/how-much-combine-window.html http://www.news-gazette.com/news/business/2014-11-02/how-muc...
  - mikestew 10y ago
    Depending on how you define "tractor", they can cost as much as your house: http://www.news-gazette.com/news/business/2014-11-02/how-much-combine-window.html http://www.news-gazette.com/news/business/2014-11-02/how-muc.... (I'll save you a click: not hard to spend half a million.)
    - saghm 10y ago
      Damn, I had no idea. Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I literally knew no one who had a tractor.
- darkhorn 10y ago
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scandox 10y ago
A Modest Proposal: Let's just all agree to have totally unique names. A simple way to do this would be to append a UUID to our surnames. That way we don't have to create new fields, any system that supports at least 2 names will continue to work. Socially we can "drop the UUID" - at least in informal situations. Also cannibalism.
- astrobe_ 10y ago
  Ok. I'm 1.
- mikestew 10y ago
  That way we don't have to create new fields I'm in, but do note that companies can't even get a email field that works correctly ("thanks for the regex, SO!"). No way more than 50% of websites as written can handle a string containing numbers and $DEITY only knows what.
Mz 10y ago
My ex husband is a junior. He joined the army not long before his father -- the senior -- retired from the army. My husband (and his father) had all kinds of pay problems the first few months of service as they mixed up the pay of father and son who were living in different places, had vastly different ranks, but were banking with the same bank. Yes, the federal government was doing this. It was all kinds of fun. (For once in my life, I am grateful for my weird ass name.)
cr0sh 10y ago
While I find it wonderful and charming that the two Lisa's finally met, and became good friends, one has to wonder at what point does such a problem become so great that simply changing one's name is the better solution? At some point, you have to ask yourself whether continuing down the same road is going to become a net loss in your life, and make the change to prevent that. That's part of being an adult. While it isn't her fault that this is happening, and it would be unfair to her that she should have to change her name to fix it, it would be the best and quickest way to prevent this issue in the future. Especially why there are warrants and other things going on which could lead to permanent life-altering events (for instance, what if in the future one of these Lisa's is wanted for murder, or something else, that sends a boatload of SWAT agents to her door in the middle of the night?). Heck, what if her new friend dies, or has something else major happen to her, and the records get mixed? With such possibilities, I know I wouldn't think twice about getting my name changed.
benibela 10y ago
The opposite is also annoying. My name is quite unique, and people are not sure what is middle name, and what is last name. So often they cannot find my file and sometimes they create a new file, so they believe I am multiple persons. Well, at least I think that is what my health care insurance is doing. My employer pays 600€/month to them, the insurance sends me newsletter snailmail every month, and when I go to the doctor, the insurance says I am not insured with them, they have no records about me; or that the insurance had not been paid for months; or they send me a e-mail that cannot send me letters, because they do not have my physical address ...
sqeaky 10y ago
The woman in this article is dumb. Things like: > I had to plead guilty and pay the fine to restore my license No she didn't, forcing the court to investigate its own ineptitude rather than accept guilt is exactly what our system is for. Even a public defender would have stood a good chance at spotting this. Or when she was shown the other address, she should have recorded it and sent a letter or visited the other person. They could have cleared this up much earlier then the time 4 elections take.
- fencepost 10y ago
  You are quite correct, she could have declined and let her license remain suspended for months while it was all ironed out. Better hope she didn't get stopped and charged with driving on a suspended license, because that just starts to get too meta - "We can't go to trial on this yet your honor, because I'm waiting on the previous trial to prove that it wasn't my license that should have been suspended in the first place!" This is like standing in the crosswalk screaming at the cars that you have right-of-way. Truth, Justice, The American Way, Honor, Beauty and everything else may be on your side, but that bumper at 30MPH is still going to hurt like hell.
  - somestag 10y ago
    > This is like standing in the crosswalk screaming at the cars that you have right-of-way. This is literally what people do where I live. I once saw a guy stop walking in the middle of the street and flip the bird to a driver who didn't seem to be slowing down. I almost had a heart attack when I thought I was about to see the pedestrian get plastered, but the driver swerved to the other lane and drove past him. Then the pedestrian yelled "fuck you!" after him. I haven't seen anyone get hit yet, but I feel it's bound to happen one of these days. The pedestrians around here are insane. It's amazing what they'll do just because they have the legal right of way.
    - jungletek 10y ago
      >The pedestrians around here are insane. It's amazing what they'll do just because they have the legal right of way. Sometimes standing up for your rights looks like insanity to an observer.
adekok 10y ago
I have very uncommon first and last names. We apparently both go to the same national bank. And my parents met his parents when the traveled on vacation. It's a small world. And even worse if you have common names.
darkhorn 10y ago
Why you don't create a unique numbers for every USA citizen? Almost every European country citizen has unique citizenship numbers.

289 points by zhte415 10y ago

seunosewa 10y ago

Could she maybe change her name?

Markoff 10y ago
that seem pretty unusual instead of trying to make police fix their systems
- drivingmenuts 10y ago
  That would require a lawsuit the author most likely couldn't afford and most lawyers wouldn't touch unless there was a significant payday (or at least a recovery of expenses) involved. Even if she prevailed, there's no guarantee that the problem would be fixed in a reasonable time frame, or at all.
- TwiztidK 10y ago
  If she changes her name it's easier, cheaper, faster, and more likely to actually happen. I agree that she shouldn't have to, but it is most likely the best solution.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  ...unusual? I could change my name for ~$100, new passport and license costs, and an aggravating amount of paperwork. I could convince the New York DMV to fix their record-keeping by... well, maybe if I convinced an influential politician to shame them for it. Maybe. I suppose I could devote years of my life to a public campaign about the issue. There's a chance that would work, though probably they'd just fix my file to shut me up and not fix the system. If your point is that this is insane, then yes, yes it is. But changing your name is almost certainly easier than convincing a large, high-bureaucracy state DMV to solve the problems they cause.
wccrawford 10y ago
She could try, but then there would be issues with that, I'm betting. Some way for it all to still affect her because it used to be her name, as well as dealing with issues from the name change.
asveikau 10y ago
Thought of that as well. I wonder how the DMV handles legal name changes. Wouldn't it be funny if the name change wound up renaming both Lisa Davises?
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Oh dear god, they might. I think either they'd start a new file, which would let you clear out even valid tickets assigned to you, or they'd rename their folder and then start a new one next time not-changed-Lisa-Davis got ticketed.
theandrewbailey 10y ago
She could, but it's a workaround to a problem that isn't hers, and the possibility of the same problem happening to someone else still exists (and there is likely many more instances). Lisa Davis is a perfectly fine name; she shouldn't have to change it for any reason.
mjevans 10y ago
In addition to the other reasons listed, it also probably wouldn't be unique enough. It seems that their records are keyed off of ONLY: * Birthdate * Last Name * First name If I were going to take the bother of changing my name I'd make the middle name, a part I can drop from most non-legal/contractual areas, the actual unique identifier. By which I mean I'd have the "middle name" be a short normal name post-fixed by a base26 encoded hash; I should probably also add 'son' at the end of that... say it's European...
- dwighttk 10y ago
  It seems like middle initial was also used... she knew the other person was Lisa S Davis but had to figure out what her middle name was.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    Let's do some back of the envelope math: 04 bits = Middle initial (It's actually 5, but I imagine the common ones cluster) 10 bits = First Name 10 bits = Last Name 120 bits = 42 adult years (12*10): 3-years ~=1024 slots ~= 10 bits A naive approach might be to add all of these together, except that's unaware of the Birthday Paradox (aka Birthday Problem). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem The sets are larger, but even with the addition of those extra 4 bits there's still going to be overlap in a non-trivial population. When is there a "good" chance of a match in all of the fields that matter? What is a "good" chance? What is an acceptable collision? I think most sane people would agree that the final question is the important one. In matters that can derail someone's life and send them to jail an acceptable false positive rate is ZERO. Therefore answering the preceding questions is largely meaningless, we already have example proof of at least one failure, which is enough to declare the system inherently broken.
    - CodesInChaos 10y ago
      120 bits for the birth date is much too big. It's closer to 14 bits (taking your 42 year figure it's log2(42*365)=13.9).

Markoff 10y ago

i still don't understand why she in first place admitted guilt for something she didn't do? is this really common procedure to admit something you didn't do in US?

panglott 10y ago
False confessions are in fact pretty common. They're most common with juveniles and the mentally ill, for example, or when people are being interrogated for 12-16 hours straight and just need to leave, or when the police lie to suspects. http://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvictions/issues/falseconfessions/ http://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvicti... https://www.exonerationproject.org/resources/false-confessions/ https://www.exonerationproject.org/resources/false-confessio... The motives for such are pretty easy to see in her story. "In 2015, I failed a background check for a new job because, according to the NYPD, I hadn’t paid the ticket 'I' had gotten for walking in a park in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn after hours, at 10pm. Now there was a misdemeanor on my record, and I had 60 days to clear it up if I wanted to keep the job, which meant trekking to lower Manhattan to criminal court. ...I tried to explain the long history of mix-ups, but the judge wouldn’t listen. He told me I’d have to go to trial, which could take months. By that time the job would be long gone. ...The cop told me to go back in and plead guilty, and then I’d pay a fine and the judge would dismiss the charge and let me off with a warning." She believed the costs to pleading guilty would be lower than fighting the charge.
macintux 10y ago
The penalty for most small crimes is less onerous than the burden of fighting them.
- lotyrin 10y ago
  Unfortunately, this is often true of larger crimes as well.
rtkwe 10y ago
The cost and bother of fighting such minor tickets, especially when the defense is kind of odd like this case, are both way beyond the small fines minor nuisance tickets like this have. Also she tried the first couple times this happened and didn't get anywhere with the judge in court (which isn't too surprising the courts that deal with those tickets have a huge number of cases to deal with every day) and she was able to get the tickets expunged through the system after pleading guilty.

jrpt 10y ago

No joke, this is happening to me right now with the SF MTA. I've already proved to them I don't own the car, but it seems like they didn't update their system last time, so I got another ticket for something I didn't do, at a place I've never been to in my life.

djsumdog 10y ago
This happened to a photography editor who sits in the cube across from me. He found out he had a ticket in Pittsburgh, a city he had never been to, when he tried to transfer his license to a new state. No lawyer would take the case either. He eventually went to an identity theft company, who took $400 and fixed the issue in three months. I use to work in Identity Management at a major university. A number of people came through our systems without SSNs. We had a complicated set of rules to make sure we didn't provision two accounts. We'd check if the names were reversed and we'd check both the month/date = date/month on the date of birth (people from other countries might enter it backwards without thinking about it). We even had rules for SSNs that were off by <2 digits with similar names. Every morning we'd have a set of "manual provisions" we'd have to stop and check. Occasionally duplicate accounts get created and we'd have to go through a big manual process of combining them and telling them "You need to use this account; forget about the other one. It no longer exists," and get their stuff synced across all AD domains (Universities typically have several). What surprises me about this article is the NYC system doesn't use the SSN (which is good in a sense, it should never be used as a identification number, see the latest GCP Greg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus). The idea of an identity and criminal record us that follows us digitally is a very new concept, one that didn't exist 150+ years ago; or at least no where near the complexity it does today. Immigration was also treated very differently. Most of are criminal background procedures in the US are plagued with problems like this; which is why most counties require fingerprint/criminal checks for immigration screenings. Today, the idea of a national identification number is highly opposed in the United States. In some ways I favour this as I feel digital identities lead to a situation where people cannot escape their pasts. But it also means people use absolutely terrible ways to associate people such as name and birthday; totally non-unique fields that should never be used to identify people. SSNs offer no real security; no photos and your number +1/-1 is most likely a valid SSN of someone who was born the same day as you.

ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago

This is awful on so many levels, but the worst part is the pettiness of the reasons for the fines.

nkoren 10y ago
That's what struck me too. As a white person, it has never once occurred to me that I might get fined for walking around after 10pm. Because I never would be.
- moftz 10y ago
  The fine was for walking through a park that closes after 10pm. They use this to prevent people from sleeping in the park at night or doing other things like prostitution and drug use in the cover of darkness. There was a city park across from my dorm in college. The park had clearly visible no trespassing after 10pm signs. We would still walk through since it was the quickest route but cops were quick to pull up and give anyone a warning. I only ever heard of people getting tickets when they were doing stuff like underaged drinking and smoking weed in the park at night.
  - bilbo0s 10y ago
    Just wondering... are you black? This is a serious question. I was not trying to be snarky, just trying to determine just how different things are if you are, say, a young black guy breaking a minor rule like that. I know the consequences are definitely different in Chicago if you are black, but I was wondering if things are better in other places in the US. (Given the contents of the article, I realize NYC is similar to Chicago, I guess I was assuming you live in another area of the country?)
  - SamBam 10y ago
    > We would still walk through since it was the quickest route but cops were quick to pull up and give anyone a warning. Exactly. If you are white, then this seems to support the parent comment's statement.

joshfraser 10y ago

Good reminder for developers to never treat a name or name/birthdate combo as a reliable primary key.

snowpanda 10y ago
On a related note. You'd be surprised how common this is in the healthcare industry. An industry where mistakes can be deadly.
- pmarreck 10y ago
  No technical clusterfuck in the healthcare industry seems to surprise me anymore All the technical problems are already solved, but as usual, it's politics and people and profit standing in the way
- lostlogin 10y ago
  You'd also be surprised how often the patient is trying to mislead. Immigration status, serious mental health issues and being wanted by the police are the three that have hit me (that I known of). It's particularly hard when there is intent to deceive.
vinhboy 10y ago
If any facebook developer is here today.. > She didn’t have the Facebook Messenger app; she’d never seen my messages. For goodness sake, fix this. This is a HUGE UX BUG in facebook. I've gotten plenty of important "hidden" messages from people through facebook. Don't let people send messages if you aren't going to show them to the receiver. This is a huge problem.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  I believe that if you don't have the app, Facebook sends you an email saying you have new Messenger message. I've never used Messenger, and this has happened to me.
  - 10y ago

moftz 10y ago

Why isn't the NYPD and DMV using the driver's license number for ID? It's a unique number and can help avoid situations like this. I would understand the confusion when the perpetrator of the crime doesn't have a license and they just provide a name, DOB, and address but some of these tickets were for people that have a license. It seems like using the license number for ID is a no brainer.

joekrill 10y ago
Maybe it isn't legal? I'm pretty sure there is a law preventing use of social security numbers for some things, so there may be something similar happening here. I don't really know, and I'd also guess something like that would vary by state.
- rohmish 10y ago
  I really don't understand US's use of SSN. You people treat it as a secret while it isn't. Now this is a place while something like SSN would've helped but NYPD still uses the old name+D.O.B. combination for checks. US is basically using a very insecure method of national identity. Maybe US should just go ahead and implement a real National Identity Program now.
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    Any move to make an official national identity program in the USA is demonized and shot on sight, no matter if it brings to light the crappy system around SSNs. A true solution would have to be usable by private industry as well. If it were up to me, it would essentially be x509 (because today, you're trusting the state and the person presenting the SSN), but people lose important shit, even proof of identity, all the time.
    - Muromec 10y ago
      That's kind of how it works in Europe - state keeps the records and assigns you a number (citizen Id, tax Id whatever), and you can use x509, possibly from private providers, to prove that it's you. Obviously that Id can't be kept secret. In Ukraine we even have an opt out for crazy Russian churchgoers who believe, that having id is literally selling their soul - they just use passport number in their x509 certs.

Keverw 10y ago

> I had to plead guilty and pay the fine to restore my license, then try to repeal the guilty plea at traffic court. Having to admit guilty when you didn't do it? What kind of system is that? Sounds like you are guilty until proven innocent in that case... instead of the other way around.

wmil 10y ago
It could be a bad system or just bad legal advice. She should have at least been able to plead 'no contest'.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Depends on jurisdiction and charge. Sometimes no contest isn't on the menu.
waisbrot 10y ago
The issue is that she wanted to be able to drive before a (possibly months away) court date. Or that she wanted a job that needed her record clean within a week. "Presumed innocent" means that at the _end_ of the trial, if the prosecution has not made their case then you are free. But in the time between being charged and the end of your trial you are not innocent. The court will suspend or revoke your license until after trial, you'll have all the charges on your record until after trial, and you can be held in prison until the trial is resolved. In all these cases, you will probably not get any compensation when it turns out that you were innocent, and meanwhile you may have been fired from work and had your property confiscated for non-payment of bills.
- emn13 10y ago
  The US justice system is a farce. Because let's be honest, there's precious little to motivate for law enforcement, prosecutors and judges to actually process your case quickly; and indeed there are various incentives to convict possibly innocent parties. Similarly; there are virtually no incentives for law enforcement to do no harm; nor are there any meaningful protections against abuse of power. It is more common for police to do the punishing than courts at this point - which begs the question whether the very existence of a criminal court doesn't do more harm than good at this point; for by having such a facade of impartiality it becomes much easier to excuse lack of oversight, accountability and proportionality on the enforcement side. Sure; it could be even worse. But is it too much to ask for at least some kind of self-corrective measure to be built into the system?

Zelphyr 10y ago

Seems like one solution would've been to legally change her name to "Lisa Xhkuwbiyt" (pronounced "Lisa Davis") since the legal records system in NY is so dumb.

nkrisc 10y ago
"It's spelled Raymond Luxury Yacht but it's pronounced Throat Warbler Mangrove."

nkrisc 10y ago

Maybe I'm just naïve but shouldn't the burden of proof be on the city to prove she's the person that was ticketed? A name and birthdate are not proof of anything.

waisbrot 10y ago
The judge is the one who determines what's "proof". In the story, he decided that name & birthdate was enough to not dismiss the case. She could have hired a lawyer and spent time fighting the case and maybe won, but she wanted to get it resolved immediately and a guilty plea is the only way to do that.
eximius 10y ago
For crimes, yes. That would probably have to happen at trial though. For traffic infractions, probably not.
BearGoesChirp 10y ago
City wants money. If it isn't this person, then the chance of them getting money goes way down. So they have a perverse incentive to force this person to pay, regardless if it is them or not, as long as the person isn't willing to fight a legal battle that ends up costing more money (if few enough people fight the legal battle, it may be more profitable to let them win their fights and keep charging all the people who don't fight). This is the problem letting the same the same entity that decides a punishment benefit from that punishment.
anywhichway 10y ago
The author breezed over a potentially important part: > I had never been to any other kind of court except traffic court (at which, both times, the police officers had flat-out lied). Reading into that it sounds like they had name, birthday, and the issuing officer saying, "yes, that was her". If the officers can't reliably witness they shouldn't be a part of the process. There should be enough records taken at the time of the ticket that the officers unreliable testimony shouldn't be needed or used.
- 10y ago

justanother 10y ago

It isn't just police. I have a somewhat common American name. A bank once opened a signature loan for one of my 4 or so same-state doppelgangers and sent me the payment coupons. One of the doppelgangers is a felon, which sucks for background checks and also because I love to travel and therefore always end up with an 'X' from the APC kiosk. Post-Trump, this means about an hour of detention in Miami while a lady questions me in Spanish until finally they realize we have different birthdays and physical descriptions. They told me it would stop if I got Global Entry. It didn't. This could all be prevented. These organizations are just flat-out negligent and don't care.

toyg 10y ago
It's a case of bad incentives: nobody is going to lose his job because they harass you, but somebody is going to suffer if a felon somehow goes through unmolested and then proceeds to do something that local newspapers might report.
logfromblammo 10y ago
I also have a common name. I was once called to the principal's office, where I, confused, started to receive a lecture. THEY: <confusing nonsense> I: What are you talking about? THEY: You know what I'm talking about. Don't play dumb. I: (after 10 seconds of thought) How many people named $NAME attend this school? THEY: <checking records> THEY: ... Two. Get back to class! Now! No apology. No sign of contrition. They acted like it was my fault that they screwed up. If it had ever happened more than once, I certainly would have raised some hell over it. They truly do not care. If there is a problem, it is your fault, for being an inconveniently irregular person. I shudder to think at how many of us would be inconvenienced if any one of the other people than share my name and birthdate were disreputable or notorious among certain government agencies. Anecdotally, municipal and circuit court judges could care less about whether you get treated fairly or not, so long as your case does not make their job even one iota more difficult. You could do 110% of their work for them, and they still might rule capriciously, telling you to appeal if you don't like it. The thing that pissed me off most about the article was the innocent party pleading guilty and paying fines. It made me want to leap through my screen and scream at her in person.

Banthum 10y ago

The author really does seem to think of black people as children who can't possibly be held accountable for anything they've done. What must it be like to be on the receiving end of such paternalism? It sounds awful. And horrifically damaging. If people tell you every day that you can't win, and you have no responsibility for bad decisions you make, how can you possibly succeed after such a psych-war campaign to make you into a control-externalizing mental infant? I'd hate my parents forever if they did this to me. She meets her black name-sharer who reveals that she is, surprise, a single mother with three kids (who she bore very young), while the author stayed married and had kids late. News flash: Blacks who simply wait to have kids and have them when married and stay married are overwhelmingly not in poverty. Meanwhile, whites who fail to do these things are very often in poverty. No racist white person is forcing anyone to have kids in their teenage years, from multiple men, and fail to marry. These are personal decisions, and bad decisions have bad consequences for people of any race. And then they sit around talking about "the utter ridiculousness of upper-middle-class white people". Yes, so ridiculous, not having kids out of wedlock, and forming stable social arrangements. And "the intense differences between Brownsville and Park Slope, very different Brooklyn neighborhoods but both suffering from a severe lack of diversity.". Yes, I'm sure those white neighborhoods are really "suffering" because there are too many whites. Must be a nightmare. She literally calls it a "version of justice" when black people give false information to police to avoid tickets for public violence: "Now I understood why the tickets were never paid: most of these Lisa Davises had, in some way, disappeared. They had given fake addresses or moved, and they were skirting the law – their own version of justice – however they could." Yes, there is racism against blacks. No, that doesn't mean black are morally-perfect shining hearts of goodness whose every action is perfect. People are people; the way this author wipes away the individual to make everyone simply a piece of their group, the way she excuses any action from someone in a victim class, is kind of horrifying. And it is racism.

maehwasu 10y ago
"The more I listened to her story, the more I realized that, all this time, Lisa wasn’t trying to steal my identity. She was trying to find her own." Agree--the whole article has a very bizarre "I got a new pet, and sometimes she pees on the rug, but she's just a puppy!" feeling.

ghaff 10y ago

This is obviously a fairly extreme case where enough identifiers match (as well as rough location) that supposedly unique official records aren't in fact unique. But, even outside of official records, I often wonder how many issues there are these days where someone with a relatively unusual name happens to share that name with someone with a prominent web profile. And that person could plausibly be them (for reasons of age, location, occupation) and have some background that would give potential employers, dates, etc. serious pause. In pre-web days, I knew someone in NYC who shared a name with someone who was notorious (and widely hated) in New York sports circles. My acquaintance literally got death threats on his home answering machine.

nraynaud 10y ago
well, in a 300 million inhabitants country, maybe it's time to think about serious unique identifiers. Countries way smaller than that did it.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Yeah, the whole tattoos-on-arms thing has some deep stigma attached to it and that's not going to be overcome easily.
  - nraynaud 10y ago
    Even Israel has a unique numbering system.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      Yes, but to be truely useful its needs to be with the person and accessible if they aren't conscious. How do you do that?
- ghaff 10y ago
  You could argue the US already comes close to it given SSN and driver's license numbers. But coming right out and having an official permanent identity number just gives a lot of people the willies. Heck, a handful of states won't even adopt REAL ID to better standardize driver's licenses. I'm not sure I even disagree. Even if the practical effect (for good or ill) is negligible in most cases, it starts to tread a bit too close to "your papers please" and standardized tracking across all systems. Some inefficiency and ambiguity isn't always a bad thing.

matmann2001 10y ago

Pretty much the same thing happened to me just a few weeks ago. I found out someone used my insurance info to pay for their emergency room visit. After much amateur sleuth-work, I came to find that the person had the exact same name and birth date, and the hospital had messed up the insurance lookup. Of course, when I called the hospital to resolve the situation, and provided a copy of my license to prove my identity, they admitted they made a mistake. And two weeks later, they used to the address from my license to send me the hospital bill.

fencepost 10y ago
Perhaps you need to look at this differently and address it with someone other than the billing department. "Two weeks later they used the address from my license to illegally send me someone else's PHI." If calling the hospital and asking to talk to someone "Because you sent me someone else's medical information" doesn't get their attention, ask them about their breach notification procedures. edit: phrasing
- matmann2001 10y ago
  I honestly don't think anyone that I'd be able to talk to on the phone there cares. Between the 4 or 5 people they passed me around to, I was given info about this other person that they had no right to give out. And that's the lesson here. Customer support representatives are so far removed from positions where they can actually be helpful, that all they are able to provide anymore is apathy and canned responses.
  - fencepost 10y ago
    That's why I phrased it as I did. I'm pretty sure that by sending his bills (presumably containing information on procedures performed, ICD10 detailed diagnosis codes, etc.) this could be considered a breach. Obviously it covers fewer than 500 individuals and the matching names is a complicating factor, but I believe that they're still required to report it to HHS within the first 2 months of 2018, and to notify the other person. Assuming that their training is worth anything at all, getting a supervisor and saying "I believe there's been a HIPAA violation and I need to know who to talk to" should get IMMEDIATE attention - it goes beyond application of a clue-by-four and should immediately get you connected to their Compliance Officer. That person should have all sorts of motivation to get things straightened out so it's not an ongoing breach with further disclosures post-notification. The other kicker is that I believe the rules changed recently such that if an individual reports a breach and it results in fines, that individual may now receive part of the penalty amount (caveat: I didn't find a citation for this, just have heard it discussed somewhere). My guess is that in your case with a matching name it's unlikely that there'd be anything like that, but just the prospect of the headaches involved should motivate people to resolve the situation.

andrewclunn 10y ago

Suddenly those eccentric people with really unusual names don't seem so crazy...

syphilis2 10y ago

I enjoyed the dig at Facebook Messenger. A few years back I was cleaning up my Facebook account and I stumbled across all of my received messages (mail? Not the same thing as Messenger). I was surprised because there were hundreds of them and I had never seen any of them before. People had responded to my marketplace listings, wanted to get lunch, asked about my pages, accepted an interview application, all kind of useful things hidden away from my view for half a decade.

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
Something similar happened to me with regular Facebook messages. Facebook, to combat spam, decided to introduce the concept of folders for messages. Besides the regular folder for messages from friends, there was ”Others“ into which all other messages were put. The UI didn’t make it very prominent and I learned about the Others folder only when I read an article about how someone missed appointments for job applications, invitations and messages from acquaintances because Facebook sorted these messages into the Others folder. Back then this happened quietly, without notification of the user. I checked my Others folder and found years old messages. Insane. All the missed opportunities and trouble that was caused for millions of people because Facebook intervened in their communication. I think Facebook now at least informs the user if they received a message from a non-friended person. Took them a long time.

noonespecial 10y ago

I spent 7 years basically unable to get credit because I owed $180k on a tractor in Kansas. I had never been to Kansas. Someone had transposed the last 2 digits of a SSN. It was nobody's job to fix it.

saghm 10y ago
I didn't even know that tractors cost $180k! I just assumed they cost around the same as a car
- noonespecial 10y ago
  The tractor (technically some sort of 'harvester') had cost around $700k. The farmer had stopped paying (probably went bankrupt) and still owed $180k. I was a 19yo, freshly back to the US from Germany (I had been there since I was 11) and suddenly found I was unable to obtain any sort of credit (like getting a phone, electricity, an apartment etc.) Everyone involved could easily see what happened. And no one could fix it.
- influx 10y ago
  Try a combine: http://www.news-gazette.com/news/business/2014-11-02/how-much-combine-window.html http://www.news-gazette.com/news/business/2014-11-02/how-muc...
- mikestew 10y ago
  Depending on how you define "tractor", they can cost as much as your house: http://www.news-gazette.com/news/business/2014-11-02/how-much-combine-window.html http://www.news-gazette.com/news/business/2014-11-02/how-muc.... (I'll save you a click: not hard to spend half a million.)
  - saghm 10y ago
    Damn, I had no idea. Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I literally knew no one who had a tractor.
darkhorn 10y ago

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scandox 10y ago

A Modest Proposal: Let's just all agree to have totally unique names. A simple way to do this would be to append a UUID to our surnames. That way we don't have to create new fields, any system that supports at least 2 names will continue to work. Socially we can "drop the UUID" - at least in informal situations. Also cannibalism.

astrobe_ 10y ago
Ok. I'm 1.
mikestew 10y ago
That way we don't have to create new fields I'm in, but do note that companies can't even get a email field that works correctly ("thanks for the regex, SO!"). No way more than 50% of websites as written can handle a string containing numbers and $DEITY only knows what.

Mz 10y ago

My ex husband is a junior. He joined the army not long before his father -- the senior -- retired from the army. My husband (and his father) had all kinds of pay problems the first few months of service as they mixed up the pay of father and son who were living in different places, had vastly different ranks, but were banking with the same bank. Yes, the federal government was doing this. It was all kinds of fun. (For once in my life, I am grateful for my weird ass name.)

cr0sh 10y ago

While I find it wonderful and charming that the two Lisa's finally met, and became good friends, one has to wonder at what point does such a problem become so great that simply changing one's name is the better solution? At some point, you have to ask yourself whether continuing down the same road is going to become a net loss in your life, and make the change to prevent that. That's part of being an adult. While it isn't her fault that this is happening, and it would be unfair to her that she should have to change her name to fix it, it would be the best and quickest way to prevent this issue in the future. Especially why there are warrants and other things going on which could lead to permanent life-altering events (for instance, what if in the future one of these Lisa's is wanted for murder, or something else, that sends a boatload of SWAT agents to her door in the middle of the night?). Heck, what if her new friend dies, or has something else major happen to her, and the records get mixed? With such possibilities, I know I wouldn't think twice about getting my name changed.

benibela 10y ago

The opposite is also annoying. My name is quite unique, and people are not sure what is middle name, and what is last name. So often they cannot find my file and sometimes they create a new file, so they believe I am multiple persons. Well, at least I think that is what my health care insurance is doing. My employer pays 600€/month to them, the insurance sends me newsletter snailmail every month, and when I go to the doctor, the insurance says I am not insured with them, they have no records about me; or that the insurance had not been paid for months; or they send me a e-mail that cannot send me letters, because they do not have my physical address ...

sqeaky 10y ago

The woman in this article is dumb. Things like: > I had to plead guilty and pay the fine to restore my license No she didn't, forcing the court to investigate its own ineptitude rather than accept guilt is exactly what our system is for. Even a public defender would have stood a good chance at spotting this. Or when she was shown the other address, she should have recorded it and sent a letter or visited the other person. They could have cleared this up much earlier then the time 4 elections take.

fencepost 10y ago
You are quite correct, she could have declined and let her license remain suspended for months while it was all ironed out. Better hope she didn't get stopped and charged with driving on a suspended license, because that just starts to get too meta - "We can't go to trial on this yet your honor, because I'm waiting on the previous trial to prove that it wasn't my license that should have been suspended in the first place!" This is like standing in the crosswalk screaming at the cars that you have right-of-way. Truth, Justice, The American Way, Honor, Beauty and everything else may be on your side, but that bumper at 30MPH is still going to hurt like hell.
- somestag 10y ago
  > This is like standing in the crosswalk screaming at the cars that you have right-of-way. This is literally what people do where I live. I once saw a guy stop walking in the middle of the street and flip the bird to a driver who didn't seem to be slowing down. I almost had a heart attack when I thought I was about to see the pedestrian get plastered, but the driver swerved to the other lane and drove past him. Then the pedestrian yelled "fuck you!" after him. I haven't seen anyone get hit yet, but I feel it's bound to happen one of these days. The pedestrians around here are insane. It's amazing what they'll do just because they have the legal right of way.
  - jungletek 10y ago
    >The pedestrians around here are insane. It's amazing what they'll do just because they have the legal right of way. Sometimes standing up for your rights looks like insanity to an observer.

adekok 10y ago

I have very uncommon first and last names. We apparently both go to the same national bank. And my parents met his parents when the traveled on vacation. It's a small world. And even worse if you have common names.

darkhorn 10y ago

Why you don't create a unique numbers for every USA citizen? Almost every European country citizen has unique citizenship numbers.