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Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

> "Future generations are going to find it impossible to register themselves on social networks with their actual birth names, because older generations have used them all."

Only if we presume:

1. Registering people with the same name is difficult-to-impossible. -- And/Or -- 2. Systems that future generations care about will have been invented at some problematic chunk of time before they attempt to register for them.

As to 1) I believe even Facebook can handle the multitude of "John Smith"s fairly painlessly. And 2) is borderline laughable.

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In regard to your first point, yes of course they can handle multiple equivalent names for display, but if you want to use Facebook as your Identity, then there can be only one.

The person at http://www.facebook.com/john.mcdowall is not me, nor is john.mcdowall1 and so on.

So? Why don't you simply use your phone number, nobody else has the same one as you. Why would identity be restricted to names?

Did you read the post?

I did, and I don't get your point. Since we already have multiple people with the same name, I don't see how a name is relevant when it comes to uniquely identifying a person.

It's not about having people with the same name, or identifying a person uniquely for the purposes of a program. It's about people changing their legal birth name in the future to a unique choice that means something to them so that they can have a single identity across all social networks or communities. They will want to do this because social networks and communities will be so ingrained into every day life, so much so that their online identity will have more meaning to that person than their legal birth name.

This is a cultural thing. By selecting a personally-meaningful name (unique or not) you give a person some form of self-expression. This self-expression can be related to online presences. It could become culturally common to do so.

But it loses the connection to ancestors that our current naming culture has. My name (first, middle, last) refers to some of my ancestors. I would not change that name. I have a few screen names that I highly favor and use in emails, forums, and gaming high scores, but I still also like my given birth name for it's genealogical associations that link me to my identity across generations.

Similarly some people's names are chosen for religious associations. In any case, will we abandon our current naming culture in favor of personally chosen names in the style of online identities?

Why don't you simply use your phone number, nobody else has the same one as you.

You do know that multiple people can share a phone number, right?

Yes, and one person can have multiple phone numbers. That was just an example of another data which can be used for identity which is far less ambiguous than the proper name. The point with identities is that, if you need to be able to identify someone with a single piece of information, it can't be defined by the person being identified; instead it has to be appointed by a globally central authority, since it's the only way to ensure uniqueness. So in any case, names are completely irrelevant when it comes to identity.

if you need to be able to identify someone with a single piece of information, it can't be defined by the person being identified; instead it has to be appointed by a globally central authority

Not necessarily; for example, people could generate their own UUIDs as identity tokens.

That's a fair point. However, identification is not only about uniqueness, it's also about proving that you are who you say you are, which still requires a central authority -- or maybe another un-fakeable certificate, although I'm not sure how it would be implemented without depending on another type of identity (such as email).

it's also about proving that you are who you say you are, which still requires a central authority

I disagree with this too, because "who you say you are" is not a single thing; it depends on the context, and you ought to be able to control what connections people can make between different contexts.

For example: I might want to give one ID to my doctor, to connect it with my medical records, and another to the DMV to identify me for a driver's license. There is no reason why these two IDs need to be the same: in other words, there is no reason why the DMV needs to verify that "who I say I am" to them is the same as "who I say I am" to my doctor. Or again, if I have to prove "who I say I am" to Social Security in order to receive benefits, that doesn't necessarily mean I have to use the same ID as I use for other purposes.

Of course, some of the reasons I would need an ID are to prove that I have a certain set of rights, as in the Social Security and DMV examples, so whoever I give the ID to has to be able to connect that ID with the appropriate evidence that I have those rights. So my "Social Security ID" would have to be connected to my employment history, or at least to my history of paying into the system, and my "DMV ID" would have to be connected to my passing of a driver's test. But that still doesn't require any single central authority to dispense or verify IDs; I could still generate my own UUIDs for each of these entities and then allow them to link those IDs to the appropriate information. The fact that we allow the government to create one central "ID" for us does not mean that's the only way to meet those needs.

And yet whenever any one of your "friends" sees or references your identity, it's displayed and interacted with as simply "John McDowall" or, more likely, "John".

Is that situation, in which merely a URL doesn't precisely map to your stated identity, somehow broken in a way that an "FM-2030" mass-name-changing cultural solution would fix?

Particularly when we consider that, to date, username preferences are for decidedly not unique options. They tend toward things like, HaloFan1 and JohnSmith73 and MrMcDowall.

Further, in almost all modern cases, these are just getting translated back to non-unique names and nicknames for display.

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