Why we don't use Galileo's last name (2009)
I worked in insurance for over five years. One of the more common reasons we had to send out HIPAA notification letters was due to relatives in the same city with similar or identical names getting claims processed under the wrong policy. These were very often two male relatives -- father and son, twin brothers, cousins. They sometimes even lived on the same street.<p>There's also this story about two women with the same name and birth date who kept getting mixed up by the government of the city they lived in and finally met to sort it out:<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-theft-racial-justice" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...</a><p>There are very real issues with not being able to reliably identify people in a world where we so routinely interact with people who don't personally know us. Thanks to my ex and I both having first-hand experience with family members having similar names, we both agreed on making sure our children had names that wouldn't cause that type of issue for them.<p>Yet I still have mixed feelings about our systems insisting on a particular name format. If it were a foolproof system, identify theft would not be a thing. Plus, it places a lot of weird, intrusive limitations on people who may not in actual fact get called by the name they are required to give as their "one true name."<p>Internet age version of this type issue:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20539187" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20539187</a><p>See also the artist <i>Banksy</i> for a similar issue in terms of an anonymous person nonetheless having a consistent public identity and body of work.