Privacy Centric Naming of Humans
The common naming triple of First Middle Last may result in more uniqueness than desired... a life sentence imposed upon you by parents unaware of privacy, databasing, freedom to reassociate, and related issues. What of defense of naming with the minimum number of bits required, in the minimum number of fields required? For example, on that root of all human databases, the typical birth certificate. You could be "a j smith" or "t jones", perhaps even "no name", "a b", or simply "a". Perhaps even numbers or any UTF-8 chars. You could expand, change and interpret them in future daily context as desired or useful, such as "t" to "tom", "tony", "terry". There are metrics to be applied such as "a" being the first in sort order, and "t" being the last character with any common frequency. And flexible phonetics that sound like names such as "d" for "dee", "j" for "jay", "l" for "elle". And where your minimum is less than some state or clerk idea of minimum, useful ambiguity can still be injected with things like gender "pat", "morgan", and shorthand "ed (eddie, edward...)", "jane (janel, janelle, janet...)".
"some body", "no body", "big horn", "fast fish", "blue cloud", "paul bunyan", "babe ruth", "joan of arc", "NULL", "<literally blank>", "<random strings>", etc.
grarpamp wrote:
The common naming triple of First Middle Last may result in more uniqueness than desired... a life sentence imposed upon you by parents unaware of privacy, databasing, freedom to reassociate, and related issues.
What of defense of naming with the minimum number of bits required, in the minimum number of fields required? For example, on that root of all human databases, the typical birth certificate.
One should also be aware of the implications of giving a child a very common name. I've known several "Chris Brown"s and an unreasonable number of "John Smith"s. Though one should be aware also of what German sociologists call 'Kevinismus' [1] -- the recognition that all names come with cultural attachments, and not all of them positive. I get asked fairly regularly if I'm Welsh (nope) since that's the association people make between heraldry and anglicized last names. Being anonymous or easily confused with another person is not all positive. In fact, I would say that it's mostly a negative. My name is uncommon, but I went by a nickname for years because it was more interesting. It also offered some amount of protection in the days before anyone could just buy my LexisNexis profile and know my weird middle name and past lovers' names and how many freckles I have. Now? Not so much. Any name plus one or two additional data points is enough to clearly identify someone in a dataset. In my case, the benefits of having a relatively uncommon name outweigh the downsides. I still have the freedom to do things anonymously or under a pseudonym, and use that freedom on a regular basis. And if my name were so unique as to cause me problems, changing it is about $250. ¯\(ツ)/¯ best, Griffin [1] http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/wissen/ungerechte-grundschullehrer-kevin-... [2] If there is such a thing as a "real name" -- I'm unconvinced -- then Griffin Boyce is mine. -- “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” ― Dr. Seuss
participants (2)
-
grarpamp -
Griffin Boyce