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I feel like it would be pretty trivial for the average person to get rid of their social presence. If they used their real names on things like e.g. forums then yeah, that will follow them.

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I don't even have much of a "social presence" but Ive definitely had certain specific affairs of my day to day life affected for the negative (applying for credit to buy a house) just because I have a very boring, mundane and incredibly common (American) name that shows up in all sorts of databases even though I'm not the exact and specific person with my name convicted of, among other things: grand larceny.

For this reasons and others I've given real thought to pursuing a legal name change.

Oh wow. That sucks. Maybe you could just add your grandfather's name as a middle name, or something like that.

The grand and hilarious paradox is that I was already named after my grandfather, heh.

It's not just social media nowadays, though. Do something stupid or embarrassing that makes your high school or college newspaper, or the blogs of your fellow students, and it is probably online and in search engines.

True. I lucked out a bit by finishing school in the late 90's.

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