Verizon refuses people named “DICKinson” | Hacker News Reader

Verizon refuses people named “DICKinson”

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12 pointszamalek11 comments

Google accounts, 2009, "Nishit", among others.

Google Plus, 2011. Everything you can imagine.

Lyft, 2019, all kinds of regexes.

Worst part is when I asked them "can I get you to commit to never, ever attempt this sort of thing" and they just looked at me and said nothing.

The agent has promised to get it looked at, at least. I am going to make sure it gets addressed. The crazy thing is that people with "profane" names were probably traumatized as kids. This type of thing can cause real emotional stress - you were right about high school never ending.

This is an example of the Scunthorpe Problem, where naive text filtering creates problems with legitimate words.

(Yes, it's unclear there's any level text filtering that will stop, for example, teenage boys from putting "rude" words into a username because their creativity in creating and disguising forbidden sentiment far exceeds the powers of any filter team assigned to the problem.)

Just get rid of these filters. What exactly are you trying to prevent? It can't possibly help in the real world and these silly examples will just recur. If there's billing associated with it, its easy enough to cross reference the billing account with the "entered names" to check for mismatch.

Who exactly is Verizon to determine if the name is valid or not?

Probably happens with Ms Null as well.

How exactly is a computer meant to know that Aabb isn't real? If I have a credit card or other mechanism, eg drivers license, with that as the name, is there any value whatsoever in that system flagging that as a fake name? Its just poor customer service. I'll be offended, they'll need to apologise. For no real gain.

I'd be fascinated to see statistics on the number of times that these filters prevented "wrong doing".

Not sure why I got downvoted. So I'll assume its someone who can't reply. For reasons.

For the record, I have an ongoing argument with booking companies seemingly every time I book something. They always misspell my name. Even if I spell it out letter-by-letter. Even if I get them to read it out.

I had an ongoing argument with an electricity company and basically got to the point after a few days where I said, "I refuse to pay any bill until my name is spelt correctly." I got a Director of Sales to confirm they'd send me accurate bills. Or else.

So yeah, these filters are trash.

What about all the Richards that go by Dick?

Maybe Pete Buttigieg can look into it.

I have a friend that during some pissed off phrase of life that involved a divorce and his mom dying changed his name to something that seems so blatantly offensive that it could hardly be. And that was completely intentional.

But... it's his legal name.

Pedophilia filter?

Nope, any name with "Dick" is seemingly blocked.

Are we back to cancelling the Scunthorpes again too? Dick Assman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Assman) will need to use T-Mobile, poor guy.

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