Keep Your Kid's Personal Info Off the Internet

"...our child’s first and last name is a truly unique combination. We’ve tried to avoid putting it out into the world where we can. At the moment, a Google search for their full name returns zero results."

I've thought about this and came to the opposite conclusion; that instead of a unique name it would be preferable to have an absurdly common name (e.g. John Jones). Getting lost in the noise is probably easier than trying to hide.

"Complicating our efforts, our child does not share a last name with either my wife or me. We gave our child a different last name to avoid picking either of our surnames or a lengthy compound name. A side-effect of the new surname is additional privacy: our child’s first and last name is a truly unique combination. "

I think this is extremely bad advice.

1. First of all, having a unique name means that you are easy to find. I spent some time finding former classmates. Those with common names are practically impossible to find if you don't have any other keywords, like an employer. For some there are hundreds or thousands of people with the same name, typically in the same age group. The worst ones are those whose name is the same as a famous person. One of my former class mate has the same name as a poet who is famous enough to have several streets and even a school named after him. No chance finding him. Another classmate has the same name as a lawyer who seems to be in hundreds of news articles and court documents. One shares the name of a record company manager, who also seems to be all over the internet.

But those who have very unusual names are trivial to find. As soon as they are mentioned anywhere on the internet, they are at the top of every google search.

If you want to protect your child's privacy, call her Taylor Swift.

2. Not sharing the last name of the kid makes your life more complicated. Every time you cross a border you need to proof to the immigration officer it's your kid. You can't easily open a savings account, get insurance.. there are many situations where you can easily do things for your kid when you share a last name, no questions asked, but if the last name is different you must proof guardianship.

This is silly.

The State has all your details allowing associations by proxy. Addresses of record are required for schools, even homeschooling.

Your best bet is to limit any undesired exposure or improper activity before it happens and use a non legal name for trusted communications. I also have names and phrases for when I'm under duress or know that my communication is not secure.

Compromising photos and innocent photos modded by AI are already in the wild.

The lack of signal will signal ludditism and anti "social" behavior, meaning integration into current and future social circles, which may be disadvantageous for some.

I'm slowly drawing my family to an offline first environment allowing us to be innocent as doves.

this is not possible anymore.

you're legally required to give the Gov and the banks etc your children's personal info. Those services are on the internet .

Worse yet, schools and community services all require Meta (Facebook) accounts to access them.

I try to compensate by telling my kids that they need to create fake persona's when playing games or chatting on the web. But I can see that this is not going to last.

I’ve done the same thing as the author (not the last name thing but the rest) and I did it because I don’t want to make decisions for my kid without their consent. Being on the internet is a bell you can’t un-ring.

Perhaps writing a blog post about it was ill advised if privacy was the goal.

Where's the actual advice this article/headline proposes to offer?

A lot of young adults going to be changing their names after having info leaked by careless or inconsiderate parents or other family members . this constitutes surveillance that no one should be subjected to without consent .