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Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record
- Aaronontheweb 16y agoWhat the hell is Eric Schmidt wearing in front of his shirt? Is that a bullet-proof vest?
- simonsarris 16y agoYes, that is a photo from his trip to Iraq, it is also his photo on twitter: http://twitter.com/ericschmidt http://twitter.com/ericschmidt
- wmf 16y agoRelated: Jaron Lanier's point (as reported by Nick Carr) that if Facebook had existed in the old days maybe Robert Zimmerman could never have become Bob Dylan. http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/facebooks_ident.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/facebooks_ident.ph...
- bmm6o 16y agoDidn't Lady Gaga (and many others) do the same thing in the Facebook era?
- tofumatt 16y agoI think this is an incredibly frumpy and sad way of viewing childhood, and the mistakes we (are entitled) to make and learn during it. Everyone does stupid stuff when they're kids and lots of people (their friends/family) know about it, and lots of people end up working with childhood friends. I led a reasonably interesting childhood (including some not-so-misdemeanor crimes) and was around in the "everything you do is documented online" era, and it hasn't impeded me as an "adult". Something like this seems to invalidate all the experiences we have as children. It reads like someone who just wishes they could act like they never did the same stupid things that everyone else did at 16.
- matwood 16y agoAnd it shouldn't impede you as an adult. Everyone does stupid stuff as kids and a lot do even more stupid stuff while in college as young adults. I've never known a job to DQ people because of something they did at a young age that could be considered stupid kid stuff. Even government jobs don't care as long as you're up front about it.
- tome 16y agoAren't people allowed to change their names in the US? In the UK one can change one's name as often as one wishes (by deed poll), as far as I am aware.
- gojomo 16y agoYes. Indeed, my understanding is that by common-law tradition, you can even use a new assumed name without any official paperwork at all, as long as you're not using it with intent to defraud someone. This of course runs into problems with modern bureaucratic assumptions, and so there are also ways to change one's name very officially as well, and register the change with all the entities requiring continuity-of-recordkeeping.
- raghus 16y agoAt which point another startup will solve the problem of what someone's original identity was.
- mattm 16y agoI've noticed in recent years that parents in North America have been giving their children 'unique' names when compared to the past. If googling your name becomes a problem, perhaps we will see parents giving their children common names so they can't be found.
- kscaldef 16y agoPerhaps that works for some people. However, I don't think there's more than a couple dozen people in the US who share my last name.
- marze 16y agoThe social stigma of such youthful indiscretions will be reduced once everyone's are documented online.
- ibejoeb 16y agoDoes it follow, then, that when we learn of all of the egregious, unsavory things the collective "we" all have done, those acts will become less so? For example, most have used ugly words at one point or another, and we can assume this. However, we don't know the precise language, context, or intention. Once those attributes are all recorded and accessible, though, will the ability to aggregate and expose them give rise to significant new social norms? Will we all speak like 4chan is written? :)
- salemh 16y agoOne would hope..or rather, the next generations "back lash" will be a more puritanical response, as most generation swings hit a full 180 from the previous.
- ibejoeb 16y agoI don't know if I hope so. There are certain behaviors for which one ought to be embarrassed and that we don't want to encourage. Shame on you for groping the girl at the bar; for that you got punched in the eye and consider it a lesson learned. But if we come to realize that this type of thing happens frequently because it's all over youtube, and it's all real, I'm not sure it's a good idea to accept it. On the other hand, you're probably right that there are some benefits in accelerating the acceptance of oddly taboo things. I'll take my privacy, though.
- philwelch 16y agoIt's hard to talk about this all in full generality, because it varies from taboo to taboo. There are a lot of taboos (homosexuality, polyamory, kinky sex) which thrive under the social consensus of "what people do in private is their own business", and once there is no privacy anymore, hopefully people will stop caring entirely about those matters. Other taboos (adultery, racism, displays of anger) won't be as easily accepted.
- jerf 16y agoWe wouldn't need to change our legal names if we didn't have to use them in the first place. I'd rather see us move towards a society more accepting of the old hacker way of choosing handles than starting making it common and acceptable to change your "base handle". (Or Truename, if you prefer.) This isn't a perfect solution, though; people would still need wisdom and foresight to get rip-stinking drunk on one handle and produce their open source projects on another, and their real-life friends have to use the correct handle for each task too. That's not going to happen. So, I'm not claiming this leads to utopia and solves all your problems. I'm just saying it's a better solution.
- DannoHung 16y agoDoesn't help when your idiot friends tag you with your real name because they are your idiot friends.
- sorbus 16y agoDon't allow arbitrary tags, then - require each tag to be linked to another entity, and give control of the text of the tag to that entity. A harder problem to solve is people mentioning true names in text.
- DannoHung 16y agoOh, so everyone has to be registered in the system?
- jerf 16y agoYeah, I, uh, kinda said exactly that.
- prs 16y agoI worry less about the tagging aspect. The real problem is having those pictures on the net in the first place.
- wmf 16y agoOr as danah boyd says, "I have a funny feeling that social technology is back to developing software based on disorders and instigating new ones in people." http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/05/03/social_technology_from_mpd_to_aspergers.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2004/05/03/social_... http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html
- maqr 16y agoBecause Google (and everyone else) will just ignore the obviously-public record of your name change and just not index that? And why stop at one name change? Why not allow people to create as many identities as they'd like? And why not multiple identities in parallel? Society (outside of the internet) seems to think this is a bad idea, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
- benofsky 16y agoI would much rather come to a stage where people aren't going to think ill of someone because of something stupid they did as a child.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- gojomo 16y agoNext up: perhaps Google will sponsor a Vinge-like 'Friends of Privacy' organization [1] to chaff the net with false personal information so no one can be certain of any supposedly-embarassing personal info they find on the net. Think of all the AdSense impressions MFA-FoP sites could generate! [1] It makes an appearance in this short -- http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serendipity http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend... -- as well as the novel "Rainbow's End".
- apgwoz 16y agoNow would be a great time to watch "we live in public," a great documentary about Josh Harris and his experiments on the topic of privacy in the modern era.
- aw3c2 16y agoYou might like Steven Rambam's traditional "Privacy is dead, get over it" talks on the HOPE conferences. http://wiki.hope.net/Main_Page http://wiki.hope.net/Main_Page in the middle of the bottom is a list of the conferences, click through and then on "talks", you will find recordings there. I listened to 2 or 3 and things repeat but they are still always refreshing and fun (and a bit over the top ;) ).
- nkassis 16y agoAside from the privacy stuff in the article, I noticed the point about recommendation. That scared me as much as the privacy issue. Not because I don't like Google or anyone else (hunch?) recommending me things but because I would hate for society to become super specialized. What I mean is, those engines will make it incredibly hard to discover new things. At least, going to the book store was always a discovery chance, Amazon sorta killed it. I still go to the brick and mortar store just for that reason, to see what else is there that's not usually on my recommendation list on amazon. I just don't want to end up pigeon holed into one world and be walled off.
- wmf 16y agoIt has been lamented during recent elections that the Web has already fragmented this way. There are conservative and liberal echo chambers on the Web that don't link to anything "outside".
- ghshephard 16y agoIronically - this is already a fairly established practice at Burning Man. Each year when we come "Home" (many of us) declare ourselves to our 40,000+ fellow community members with a new name. You use it in your camp, and at all the places you visit, so people know you by _no other name_ then the one you've used. Some people rotate these names year after year, some keep the same tag - there are hundreds of people I know _only_ by their playa name. Further to that - the sheer lack of eletronica on the Playa means that what little is tracked (presuming they don't log onto tribe.net when they get back to the 'real world'), is verbal. Truly is a home away from home.
- kirubakaran 16y agoWhat if all of us changed our names to be John Doe?
- a-priori 16y agoThen the world would turn into a Monty Python sketch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_p0CgPeyA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_p0CgPeyA
- bemmu 16y agoThis will work fine, except when in 2013 Google comes up with the "Your search for John Doe has been expanded to include their previous name, Evil Doe"-feature.
- edw519 16y agoOK, I'll take one for the community. My new name: Edward '); DROP TABLE YouthfulIndiscretions;-- In less than 1 minute, all your worries will be gone :) (compulsory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/327/ http://xkcd.com/327/) [ASIDE: Normally, I don't post references to jokes, but with Eric Schmidt these days, it's sometimes hard to tell which is the real post and which is the joke.]
- SkyMarshal 16y agoOr how about parents give their children throwaway names that they use until they grow up (whatever age that may be), then switch to their real adult names.
- bd 16y agoThis wouldn't work anyways. Especially for datamining-is-our-core-competency company like Google it should be relatively trivial to match your old and new identity. There are plenty of ways how to do it. There are only 7 billion people, you just need 33 bits to uniquely identify someone [1]. On social networks you leave much bigger trail of clues (photos, timelines, locations, friends, activity patterns, likes/dislikes, writing samples, etc). Put together enough of vague data and your identity will pop out. Remember EFF's Panopticlick [2]? [1] http://33bits.org/ http://33bits.org/ [2] https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
- photon_off 16y agoHow does one determine 33 bits of information about the world population such that each bit is 'on' in very close to half the population?
- bd 16y agoTry this: http://en.akinator.com/ http://en.akinator.com/ It's pretty good at figuring out who you think about (fictional or real) just by asking yes/no questions.
- jay_kyburz 16y agoI like to imagine a culture where your real name is a secrete known only to you and your immediate family, and the name everybody else knows you by is an alias that changes from year to year. It's very science fiction.
- run4yourlives 16y agoI have a better one for you Schmitt: Google my name. (Check my profile) Now as embarrassing as the things I say on my website are in and of themselves, check out the entries on that first google result page and you find this wonderful character: The Baltimore City Grand Jury indicted David Piccione, 28, on charges of kidnapping, false imprisonment, second-degree assault and reckless endangerment. Court documents allege on July 11 while at a gas station David Piccione and his ex-girlfriend got into an argument. Piccione assaulted the woman, dragged her into his car against her will and drove away. Figure out how to remove my not too common name from sharing a front page with that genius!
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoI completely agree that, even more damaging than what we do to our reputation, it's what other people do that can be catastrophic. The ideal solution (for me) would be a curated response. Unfortunately, that is probably not ideal for who(m?)ever is searching for me. [Serious question: who or whom? The phrase is the object of a preposition, but the placement is the "subject" of that object.]
- Tichy 16y agoThere must be some SEO firms specialised on cases like this already? Create n fake hits for a name and push them to the front page? Although if a potential employer googles for "name+criminial record" it would fall apart again. Instead of names, we could just use social security numbers to prevent confusion...
- T_S_ 16y agoBe sure to choose a name that nobody would choose for themselves. You know, for authenticity.
- sprout 16y ago>That seems... crazy. Maybe he was simply observing that such policies were likely to take shape in the future. But if they do, the company he runs will be the primary cause of it. I believe you're looking for Mark Zuckerberg, not Eric Schmidt. Google doesn't force you to sprawl your name all over the web, they just make it a little easier to see where it's happened.
- ANH 16y agoGeneration R (regretful) to be followed by Generation S (silent and serious).
- 16s 16y agoWe humans do things that we regret. It's part of being human. Unless we are murderers or rapists or something similar, then I don't understand the concern. For every bad/embarrassing thing I've ever done, there are hundreds of good/non-embarrassing things. That is true for everyone.
- wooptoo 16y agoJohn Smith. Problem solved.
- 16s 16y agoOne other concern is people pretending to be you. Someone who wanted to harm your online reputation/character and could join many forums pretending to be you and post pics, flames, etc. all under your name using a free hotmail or gmail account that looks similar to your real email account. maybe pau1graham@hotmail.com (a one rather than an L) For people who don't really know you (like potential employers) that might be enough of a character assassination to not get you into an interview or for them to have general negative feelings towards you. I suppose that's one good reason to use GPG and sign all emails.
- zacharypinter 16y agoDoesn't quite address the upcoming concern of face recognition and image search.
- lemming 16y agoI agree, this is scary stuff. My girlfriend worked at an ad agency who had a campaign that involved finding people who looked like you based on their Facebook profile photo. It's only a small skip and a jump to a plugin for Google Goggles that allows me to snap a photo of the cute girl on the train and know everything there is to know about her.
- JulianMorrison 16y agoMeh. Won't work. Your phrasing and vocabulary are distinctive - a sufficiently smart (or brute force) AI could track you through all your aliases. Not to mention you are bound to leave a paper trail that Google could follow. If they let your anonymity stand, it's because they deliberately chose not to look.
- nostromo 16y agoSolution: A friend of mine is named Dave Matthews. He is ungooglable.
- adolph 16y agoneed a robots.txt for my identity? yet another thing to manage...
- GBKS 16y agoHe more I think about his statements, the more they seem like non-sense. What does your wife do when you change your name? What about your credit card, passport and mortgage? It took 10 months for the German government to get me a new passport due to name change. Please tell me why I would do that just to get rid of some links to drunk photos of me? And please, aren't there more important problems to solve than telling me to buy milk? IMHO, Google is trying to solve the wrong problem here.
- philwelch 16y agoSchmidt suggests changing one's name when one goes from childhood to adulthood. This is not far from common practice in some cultures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_name
- mattmcknight 16y agoIt's a bit of a misleading headline, as Google is hardly the only "permanent" record out there. Working in government IT though, the idea of document retention periods is quite important. With the cost of storing bits greater than zero, many of them make way as time passes. The Web itself is quite young. Do we expect all Facebook photos to be retained for thirty years? Do we expect Facebook to exist in thirty years? I am also surprised no one has proposed a GUID system thus far.
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- maxklein 16y agoI agree with him. Names are old ways of referring to people - in my opinion, a name is just a brand, and you should use several names to represent different things, and avoid the confusing overlap.
- losethos 16y ago27 He who spares his words is truly wise, and he who is chary of speech is a man of intelligence. 28 Even a fool, if he keeps silent, is considered wise; if he closes his lips, intelligent.
- macromicro 16y agoDid everyone forget about this?? http://xkcd.com/137/ http://xkcd.com/137/