A bit more about Online Identity.

[rhythmaning]

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about social networking, trying to work out how I felt about online identity.

When I was visiting some friends a short while after, they had a bit of a shock regarding their daughter’s online identity. A friend of hers had emailed her from school with a link to a website that was picked up by the school’s anti-pornography email filter. The headmaster had forwarded the email to my friend – he couldn’t look at the site (for obvious reasons!), and he wanted my friends to be aware of the email’s content.

It turns out that my friends’ daughter shares her name with a porn star.

(Actually, she shares her first name and her mother’s maiden name with a porn star; but it is the same thing, really.)

The girl’s friends had simply attached a google search of her name to the email; since they had done the search at school, they couldn’t have looked at the site that came top. (Thinking about it though, the school should really have better filters – I think you can set google to ignore porn websites: you’d have thought a school would want to do that!)

The mother was really freaked out by this; her husband and I were a lot less phased, which might simply be that as blokes we are aware of the commercial nature of most of the internet. She was also really disturbed that anyone googling her daughter’s and her names would find material like that, and that this would haunt her daughter through her life.

I can see it is a problem: if she takes her mother’s maiden name, which isn’t wholly unlikely, that is what employers or friends would google to see what was out there. But also, there is more or less nothing that one can do about it.

Except buy all possible web addresses comprised of your names!

Comments

[matgb]

Actually, owning the web addresses wouldn't help, and odds are the pro already has a fair few of them as redirects.

But getting a huge bunch of people to link to a site or two with the name in the link text would help.

She has an advantage, googling her will get someone else first, pretty much guaranteed, thus making it harder for employers to find stuff on her with an easy let out (that's obviously not me, etc).

It's better to be either hidden completely or control your top results, I took the latter route, and keep meaning to write up a how-to (especially given I'm doing it for clients now anyway).

Top result for my name is my LJ, deliberately, helped by a few top bloggers linking in to it as such, but I've carefully managed other sites so I'm most of the first two pages now, and none of it something I don't want people to see.

[kittenexploring.livejournal.com]

It'll haunt her at school, and probably already does, but the porn star will fade out pretty quickly. There will just be a few old recordings hanging around before long.

[kittenexploring.livejournal.com]

Oh, and at school if there wasn't a porn star of the same name then one vaguely similar to her would be assigned to her for teasing purposes.

[frumiousb.livejournal.com]

There's a woman in New Jersey who is a rabid-- conservative isn't the right word. I'm not sure what to call her. But she regularly writes letters to the editor advocating the death penalty for car thieves and calling for the hands of purse snatchers to be cut off. We share the same name. I find that kind of funny.

I'd look at it as a plus. Except for some highschool teasing, noone will confuse her with the porn star. Makes her hard to find. My boss shares a name with a famous Hollywood star. Same effect.

I've been thinking about this lately because it has annoyed me that a whole crop of frumiousb's have appeared online. I've been using this name since-- gosh-- 1990? in one form or another. Newsgroups first, web later. I realize that it kind of bugs me that others are using it, and that people mix us up. Weird that it bothers me more than someone sharing my name.