Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record | Hacker News Reader

Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record

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99 pointschacha10278 comments

We 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.

Doesn't help when your idiot friends tag you with your real name because they are your idiot friends.

Don'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.

Oh, so everyone has to be registered in the system?

Yeah, I, uh, kinda said exactly that.

I worry less about the tagging aspect. The real problem is having those pictures on the net in the first place.

Or 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_... http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html

The more technology advances, the bigger the portion of our lives that is recorded. Also, the ability to find these things grows more and more as well.

Seriously, in 50 years, I'm guessing it will be a simple matter to search for all the pictures on the internet that you appear in, with or without tags. The technology isn't there yet, but it's getting pretty close.

Slightly OT observation - but nobody uses handles anymore. I feel positively archaic that my email addresses are still handles instead of my real name.

Except for that tiny niche we call "gamers" you may be right.

Oddly enough, this may be because the bulk of what happens in multiplayer gaming can be considered "youthful indiscretions".

Almost every niche website I look at still relies very heavily on handles. Harry Potter fanfiction (and fandom in general) uses handles much more than real names. So do gymnastics message boards. So do sci-fi/fantasy book message boards. So does NaNoWriMo. So does gaming, obviously.

I think what you're observing is that as people grow up and become more "successful", a larger proportion of their social contacts become professional contacts. There's a very strong tendency in professional spheres to use your real name, because that's what you do business under. A large portion of America, however, works at the mall, or Starbucks, or WalMart, or other random McJobs where you can't really build a career. For them, using their real name gains them essentially no benefit but can easily cost them their job.

Depends where you look. When Livejournal people come to Facebook, they insist on bringing their "gothic" handles with them, for example.

and you called yourself potatolicious?

I don't think fracturing our identities is a very honest way to live. Imagine what that would be like--it's like if Richard Feynman was the guy who did all the physics, but some guy under some other name did all the carousing, and no one was supposed to know or acknowledge they were the same person underneath. Feynman would become some inhuman source of knowledge instead of the real (and brilliant, and unique) human being he really was.

they were the same person underneath

Were they?

Everyone has many personas. Storytellers and actors are experts at crafting personas and switching their minds in and out of them, but it's not an activity that's restricted to artists. Everyone does it.

I have an authorial voice when I write on HN. It isn't the same as the voice I use in the rest of the world. For one thing, I don't speak in carefully edited three-to-six paragraph essays.

I'm also a different person to my wife than I am to my coworkers, a different person at a funeral than I am at a blue-collar bar, and a different person when I'm healthy than when I'm in chronic pain.

This isn't some kind of lie. It's how human personality works: Your personality isn't some Platonic ideal that lives alone inside your head; it's embodied in flesh, conditioned on environment, and constantly retuning itself in reaction to society.

Your example undermines your point. Richard Feynman deliberately adopted a variety of public (and private) personas and switched between them depending on the circumstances. For example, he consciously adopted a different persona in front of a general audience than in front of other expert physicists. He explicitly discusses this in his book. After winning the Nobel Prize he would try to give a seminar, and they'd stick him in a huge auditorium full of everybody in town, and he'd feel so guilty about putting on his experts-only talk that he'd switch into his general-audience mode and give a general-audience talk. But he missed being able to give expert-level seminars so much that he started giving seminars under a pseudonym. Yes, he invented a handle. Very hackerly of him.

There are degrees to which that is expected, and healthy. Covering it all up and trying to ensure no one can connect together your various personas crosses an important line in my opinion.

Presumably you have never had the experience of being a dissident, fleeing an abusive situation, or simply being embarrassed by some of your friends or coworkers.

Or, say, being a grade-school religion teacher who wants to have a sex life. Or being a counselor: Psychological counselors are explicitly forbidden by professional ethics from interacting with their clients outside of work, for very very good reasons; how this will play out in the era of ubiquitous Facebook will be... interesting. I wouldn't be surprised to see counselors adopting pseudonyms, if not actual disguises.

I believe it was Danah Boyd, among others, who pointed out that it's much easier to believe in the one-identity theory of humanity if your identity is that of a white well-off Ivy-educated professionally-successful male American. It's certainly a description that fits Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg to a T.

>We wouldn't need to change our legal names if we didn't have to use them in the first place.

Alternately, if everyone used real names we will come to accept that few are the model of perfection, and finding that someone posted something dumb online will be akin to pointing out that they probably had a bowel movement over the past 24 hours.

Everybody poops. (aside: Though why then do I feel a tinge of discomfort walking around the grocery store with a giant club-sized pack of toilet paper?)

And for those who really go outside of the curve: is personal responsibility for your actions really that unacceptable? Are we all such a bunch of irresponsible assholes that we need to separate our fake selves from our real selves?

The whole "everyone should be anonymous" bit over the past while has me concerned at what essentially amounts to group cowardice. The standard response to a statement like that is to point at an incredibly rare example, like that guy in South Korea (or some other far off land) who stalked someone after some online game. Aside from the statistical oddity of something like that happening (which we're clearly too smart to overstate, right?), the paradox is that in that case the participants had the veil of pseudo-anonymity, which makes you wonder if the intense aggression fomented more because of the belief that they were anonymous. If they were fully public the issue would likely have never happened in the first place.

A neighbourhood becomes dangerous and downtrodden when good people hide away, leaving the miscreants and hoodlums -- a very small minority in virtually any area -- to ply their trade unchecked. Once people overcome their fears and start taking walks, encouraging others to do the same, soon that fear dissipates and it becomes a community again.

But you have to provide a mechanism for people to remain anonymous. Otherwise there is no way to speak out against corrupt people in power.

>>finding that someone posted something dumb online will be akin to pointing out that they probably had a bowel movement over the past 24 hours.

He, one of the top hits on my name was when I sent in a bogus error report to Ubuntu. :-)

(I don't keep a log of what I do on my personal computers and had forgotten that I had bungled an install earlier of a DB I just tested.)

I 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!

I 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.]

There 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...

The social stigma of such youthful indiscretions will be reduced once everyone's are documented online.

Does 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? :)

One 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.

I 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.

It'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.

We might hope. But hypocrisy is as old as the hills. We hold people to unrealistic standards; they pretend to meet them.

And there will always be some subset of people who manage to minimize their paper trail -- by never creating it, or destroying it afterwards. (Notably, in Europe, privacy laws seem to be evolving to require sites to take such material down.)

We may wind up giving the most-skillful hypocrites and those with the pull to cover up their private lives even more power over the rest of us.

Or maybe the people who don't have any secrets to hide will be seen as weird and vaguely suspicious, and hence less trustworthy when they try and tell the majority of people to stop doing what the majority of people do all the time.

I dont know how likely that is. As a group humans seem to value idealism and places that on a pedestal while individually failing to meet those standards.

As a group, humans also seem all too eager tear anyone down who seems to achieve perfection. Though this is worse in some cultures, it's present to some extent everywhere.

If you're in your 30s or 40s now, and a geek, then there's a high probability that your youthful discretions are documented online but your peers aren't because they simply weren't online in the the 80s and 90s. What you say may be true, but it only applies to people who are teenagers right now.

I 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.

And 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.

Ironically - 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.

This 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.

This 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/

[2] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

How does one determine 33 bits of information about the world population such that each bit is 'on' in very close to half the population?

Try this:

http://en.akinator.com/

It's pretty good at figuring out who you think about (fictional or real) just by asking yes/no questions.

I'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.

Perhaps 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.

Aside 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.

It 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".

One 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.

Related: 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.ph...

Didn't Lady Gaga (and many others) do the same thing in the Facebook era?

It'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.

I 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.

>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.

I 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.

He 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.

What the hell is Eric Schmidt wearing in front of his shirt? Is that a bullet-proof vest?

Yes, that is a photo from his trip to Iraq, it is also his photo on twitter:

http://twitter.com/ericschmidt

OK, 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/)

[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.]

Solution: A friend of mine is named Dave Matthews. He is ungooglable.

Meh. 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.

At which point another startup will solve the problem of what someone's original identity was.

Doesn't quite address the upcoming concern of face recognition and image search.

I 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.

I 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.

Now 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.

You might like Steven Rambam's traditional "Privacy is dead, get over it" talks on the HOPE conferences.

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 ;) ).

Aren'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.

Yes. 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.

What if all of us changed our names to be John Doe?

Then the world would turn into a Monty Python sketch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_p0CgPeyA

Because 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.

We 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.

Be sure to choose a name that nobody would choose for themselves. You know, for authenticity.

Schmidt 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

Generation R (regretful) to be followed by Generation S (silent and serious).

Or 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.

Did everyone forget about this?? http://xkcd.com/137/

Next 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-serend... -- as well as the novel "Rainbow's End".

John Smith. Problem solved.

need a robots.txt for my identity?

yet another thing to manage...

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