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

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.)<p>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 <i>better</i> solution.

I have a better one for you Schmitt:<p>Google my name. (Check my profile)<p>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:<p><i>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.</i><p>Figure out how to remove my not too common name from sharing a front page with that genius!

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

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.<p>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".<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Truly is a home away from home.

This wouldn't work anyways.<p>Especially for <i>datamining-is-our-core-competency</i> company like Google it should be relatively trivial to match your old and new identity.<p>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].<p>On social networks you leave much bigger trail of clues (photos, timelines, locations, friends, activity patterns, likes/dislikes, writing samples, etc).<p>Put together enough of vague data and your identity will pop out. Remember EFF's Panopticlick [2]?<p>[1] <a href="http://33bits.org/" rel="nofollow">http://33bits.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://panopticlick.eff.org/" rel="nofollow">https://panopticlick.eff.org/</a>

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.

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.

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.<p>I just don't want to end up pigeon holed into one world and be walled off.

One other concern is people pretending to be you.<p>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)<p>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 <i>all</i> 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. <a href="http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/facebooks_ident.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/facebooks_ident.ph...</a>

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.<p>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?<p>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.

&#62;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.<p>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?<p>And please, aren't there more important problems to solve than telling me to buy milk?<p>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?

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 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.

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.

Because Google (and everyone else) will just ignore the obviously-public record of your name change and just not index that?<p>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.

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

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: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_name" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_name</a>

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?? <a href="http://xkcd.com/137/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/137/</a>

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!<p>[1] It makes an appearance in this short -- <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serendipity" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/synthetic-serend...</a> -- as well as the novel "Rainbow's End".

John Smith. Problem solved.

OK, I'll take one for the community. My new name:<p>Edward '); DROP TABLE YouthfulIndiscretions;--<p>In less than 1 minute, all your worries will be gone :)<p>(compulsory xkcd reference: <a href="http://xkcd.com/327/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/327/</a>)<p>[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.]

need a robots.txt for my identity?<p>yet another thing to manage...