Name Change To Escape Cyber Past?
August 18th, 2010 by ComputerBob
Regular readers of this Journal know that I’m a domestic violence survivor.
They also know that, after enduring decades of abuse from my biological family, my wife and I finally cut off all contact with them more than four years ago, and moved on with our lives. Afterward, as part of our healing, we legally changed our last name. Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of our name change.
Anyone who’s ever done it, knows that even though legally changing your name can have many psychological benefits, it doesn’t let you escape from your debtors or walk away from your criminal past or your legal obligations — all of those things are simply linked from your old name to your new name in everyone’s records.
But at least one person thinks that changing your name may have a different but necessary benefit in the future: “The private lives of young people are now so well documented on the internet that many will have to change their names on reaching adulthood, Google’s CEO has claimed.”
But unless the legal name-change process changes significantly in the future, and unless everyone can convince every single one of their friends on Facebook and every other social networking site to keep their secrets, I don’t think that legal name changes are going to do much to help people hide their youthful indiscretions.
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Tags:
Domestic Violence, Dubious, Ethics, Future, Google, Internet, Law, Personal, Rights, Survivors