

Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record - chacha102
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_ceo_suggests_you_change_your_name_to_escape.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+readwriteweb+(ReadWriteWeb)&utm_content=Twitter

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jerf
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.

~~~
potatolicious
Slightly OT observation - but _nobody_ uses handles anymore. I feel positively
archaic that my email addresses are still handles instead of my real name.

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

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

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run4yourlives
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!

~~~
SoftwareMaven
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.]

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

~~~
ibejoeb
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? :)

~~~
salemh
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.

~~~
ibejoeb
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.

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tofumatt
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.

~~~
matwood
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.

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ghshephard
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.

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bd
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/>

~~~
photon_off
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?

~~~
bd
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.

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bemmu
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.

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mattm
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.

~~~
kscaldef
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.

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nkassis
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.

~~~
wmf
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".

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16s
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.

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wmf
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...](http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/facebooks_ident.php)

~~~
bmm6o
Didn't Lady Gaga (and many others) do the same thing in the Facebook era?

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mattmcknight
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.

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jay_kyburz
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.

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sprout
>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.

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benofsky
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.

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GBKS
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.

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

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

<http://twitter.com/ericschmidt>

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

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JulianMorrison
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.

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

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

~~~
lemming
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.

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maxklein
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.

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apgwoz
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.

~~~
aw3c2
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 ;) ).

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tome
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.

~~~
gojomo
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.

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maqr
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.

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

~~~
a-priori
Then the world would turn into a Monty Python sketch.

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

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16s
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.

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

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philwelch
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>

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

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SkyMarshal
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.

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

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gojomo
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...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serendipity)
\-- as well as the novel "Rainbow's End".

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wooptoo
John Smith. Problem solved.

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edw519
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.]

------
adolph
need a robots.txt for my identity?

yet another thing to manage...

