Imagine being called John Graham-Cumming. Long, long ago Google didn't understand that "Cumming" was a name. Google myself, get served ads for adult web sites.
And Eudora's Mood Watch feature would flag every single email I sent as offensive.
And Eudora's Mood Watch feature would flag every single email I sent as offensive.
Somehow delivery of order confirmation emails have never been an issue!
Edit: eeek I don't order from there, I just work with the website's host!
Similar note, my surname is Fahey, which is Irish. For a few years after 9/11 my dad would get pulled aside for screening almost every time he flew alone. It was basically guaranteed if he was flying one-way.
Our guess is that we were getting lumped in with some sort system that assigned higher risk to people with Arabic sounding names. Every Arabic surname I'm aware of begins with Fa[1]. Plus, if you look at it phonetically, both Fahey and the Arabic names ending with i have an ee sound at the end.
I've always wondered if that was a coincidence. A computer might not even have been involved, since it never happened flying from Chicago, where most people recognize Fahey as Irish, it only happened flying to Chicago.
Of course my dad tends to talk to himself when he is thinking, so who know, maybe he just looked really shifty.
[1] Wikipedia list of Arabic surnames as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Arabic-language_surna...
first_name[0] + last_name[:6]
(she was also really great to work with, and she knows her stuff when it comes to robotics... if anyone happens to run across her resume anywhere, hire her)
There was also the athlete Kevin Youkilis, who happens to be Jewish. One website that lists pro athletes used this scheme to provide a unique URL for each athlete:
last_name[:5] + first_name[:2]
(I don't know Kevin Youkilis personally. I got this off TVTropes.)
I had a particular friend in childhood. What on earth Mr and Mrs Head were thinking about when they named their son Richard is beyond me. They already had a daughter called Rachel so should have got the hang of the naming process the second time around.
I knew a Richard Bates in college (yes, the same guy from the Silk Road trial). He betrayed one of my best friends in a really deplorable way, so you can guess the nicknames we called him behind his back.