Having a unique name makes it easy to google you. Today, tomorrow, and forever.
Me, I’m a quiet, shy type of person, who values privacy. I would want to give my baby the opportunity to be the same. If he wants to be famous, let him choose the path he wants.
But if he wants to be like me, I’d want to offer him the opportunity…
And that means NOT giving him or her a name that will permanently link them to any negative information that may happen to show up on google. (say, a teenage prank gone wrong.)
What say you Dopers with young children? Did you consider internet privacy when you chose the baby’s name?
(Disclaimer: I’m close to retirement age.
And I’m an ornery Luddite, who is quite proud of not having a Facebook page, and glad that I have almost no presence on the internet. )
Kids today will grow up with a completely different view of privacy than we did. It won’t matter in the same way. Nothing wrong with being googled anyway, I don’t have a unique first name but combined with my surname I am easily found, and there’s only one truly embarrassing thing online that I wish I had thought ahead about. If I had not done that, then I would have no fear of being searched online.
I have a fairly rare last name, as in major metro area phone books will have just one or two entries with my last name. I have a middlin’ common first name for my year group which has gone out of style over the intervening 50+ years since I was given it.
Nonetheless, LinkedIn has 41 registrants worldwide with my first and last name. And Googling my name turns up lots of hits, including an arrest record in NJ for armed robbery 10 years ago.
I have exactly zero presence on the net in my own name. 100% of the LinkedIn & Google results are somebody else.
My point being that if somebody is going to Google a name and act on what they find, you’re at risk from having a semi-rare name also. Who knows how many times the armed robber has prevented one of my namesakes from getting a job or a date.
It seems to me that IF I’m going to behave better than the average American, I’d do better with a unique name than I would with one in common with even a small number of people.
The only alternative is to change to “John/Jane Smith” and intend to hide in plain sight, being a needle in a haystack. Then again, even a little smarter Googling today, much less the sorts of smarter Big Data algorithms that will be commonplace when today’s newborns are adults, will enable folks to find the you “John Smith” in all the noise of all the other John Smiths. Or at least reduce the cloud of matching John Smiths to just a few dozen, one of whom is still an armed robber, party animal, etc.
IMHO, you’re screwed no matter what name you take. Whether you’ve got a unique or common name, you’ll be tagged by at least some would-be investigators with all the dumb stuff that finds it’s way online that’s done by you or any other namesake.
Your baby will probably not grow up in “the internet age”, which will be as ephemeral as any other age. By the 2030s and '40s, the baby you brought into the world will have much different challenges to deal with, that you cannot imagine.
I have a unique name combination. Both my first name and my last name are somewhat unusual, but I’m the only one with the combination. If you do a google search on my name, every hit refers to me, except for one twitter account that is in my name, but not mine. This is problematic for me because I once had an online stalker who threatened me numerous times, signed me up for internet dating sites, and called me as much as 200 times in a day. I’m thinking he may be behind the twitter thing too. I prosecuted him and he received a year of probation. The day his probation ended, he started up again. I moved out of state to put distance between us as he only lived about half an hour away from me. He hasn’t contacted me since. Even though a search for my name pulls up where I work, I’ve had access to my contact information restricted. I’d never give a kid a name that’s so unique.
Not stalkerish, but for years, the links that first showed up at google had to do with Amazon reviews or old listservs from where I was a teenaged college student.
Luckily institutions and business have evolved so as to hide (or ask permission to share first) that kind of information (thank you, UF, for finally deleting/storing away listservs from 12 years ago!). I’m also happy for defunct websites.
And finally, I have evolved enough that the first hits now are professional. Not much I can do about that, and not much I can do to deny that part of myself.
Having lived thru that, the only thing I would do to my kid wouldn’t be related to the name, but related to his/her actions. Be mindful of what they do and what gets posted where and what are the security levels they keep on their profiles.
Given our mouthful of a lastname, ensuring that my generation’s children have non-unique names requires naming them after a relative; my family tends to do the opposite. But we do tend to choose firstnames which are easy and common, partly to compensate for the mouthful. I think if your lastname is along the lines of Goicoechea de Arrizabalaga (our mouthful is shorter), calling your kid anything more complex than Michael should get CPS called, on a count of “cruelty to a minor”.
I’ve mentioned in other threads, I’ve been periodically stopped and pulled aside at passport control on account of shared names. Search Google for the name I provide in professional context and what you will find is not me until you’re pages deep.
Sensible people will know to not base critical decisions on what pops up in Google under a common name. And that many of us have adopted multiple e-mail personas to compartmentalize.
As someone else said, by the time a child born today starts worrying about these things, there may be entirely different issues at play.
I am the only person with my name in the world as far as I know. I am very easy to Google or look up in any other way but it hasn’t caused me any particular problems. It did make it much easier for long-lost friends to find me back before Facebook existed and search engines weren’t as good.
Several years ago, I got a card from the voters registration office, asking me to reconfirm that I am still alive. Apparently, in Texas, the death registries are scanned, and everyone who has the same name as a person who dies is removed from the voter list until they reconfirm their quickness.
The real challenge is the number of idiots who do Google screening that have no idea how common a name is or isn’t. So they think “This guy I’m background-checking for HR is the only Samuel Johnson I’ve ever heard of; so anything Google finds must be about him.”
Og save us all from stupid people with smart power tools.
I have a very unusual first name AND last name. Googling my name immediately brings up a bunch of links all about me, my personal information and my hobbies (things like my facebook, my email, that I’m a member of a chess club, rubik’s cube contest results, internet games I used to play, etc.) I HATE IT. Any sort of stalker who wanted to could find out all sorts of stuff about me. I really wish my parents had chosen a common name.
I think having a common name is important for online privacy reasons, but also because weird names may lead to unconscious discrimination on the part of the HR rep who reads through resumes. Fortunately, all my youthful online shenanigans were conducted under a gaming alias that is not (publicly) associated with my identity in any way. I also toned down all internet activity under my real name several years ago–went incognito on Facebook, changed my email name to my initials, deleted Myspace/Linkedin/etc. I used to be at the top of search results for my relatively-uncommon name, now I’m nowhere in the first several pages.
If I was the only myname in existence, things would be different.
