I was thinking about this the other day. My last name is extremely rare; less than 20 people in the world have it. As such, I am completely unable to maintain

I was thinking about this the other day. My last name is extremely rare; less than 20 people in the world have it. As such, I am completely unable to maintain any level of anonymity in the world today. It's trivial to find anything I've been up to by using Google or Bing. You can even see my entire family and what they've been up to and there's no doubt they're my family because my last name is so rare. I seriously considered changing my last name to Smith. I think it's better to have nefarious people drown in a sea of false positives than it is to give them pinpoint accuracy directly to me (as I have today) or few enough false positives (as Stephen Law has) that they catch a lot of innocent people in their wide net. I actually know some people with the Smith last name. Every time they buy a house, the title insurance company provides them a list of deadbeats with their exact same name and they simply sign a form saying, "Not me" and their transaction continues. Imagine if they wanted to put John Smith or Joseph Brown on the OFAC list. They'd never be able to.