Turning 18? Time to change your name!
Any unflattering photos of you online? Comments you made on a friend’s blog that you wish you hadn’t? When you can’t change what’s online about you, you might find yourself wishing you could just walk away from that stuff – disconnect your real-world self from your online self.
The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, thinks you can. He even predicts that in the future, this practice would be commonplace:
“He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.
“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.”
Already, some young people about to apply to university and look for jobs are making it a little harder for people to find them on social networking sites – by substituting middle names for last names, using nicknames, or making up entirely fictional names. However, changing your name legally isn’t nearly as simple as changing your name on Facebook. There is a long list of legal and long-term implications associated with changing your name, not to mention the historical implications of the change – how will your great-great-great-grand-daughter fill in the family tree if you erase all traces of yourself before the age of 18?
What do you think – should we be allowed a name change to escape an embarrassing past? Would you change your name if you could? Have you?
Tags: Facebook, online identity, Online Presence