Name Collisions

I have a personal connection with name collision, my name is David Brown. I have confidence in telling you this because this name is very common. Last I checked there are roughly 6 of us for every 100,000 people in the United States.

I want to be clear, I like my name. I think it is a fine name and would never think in a thousand years to change it. However, with the name, I’ve developed an acute sense of when systems are exposing a name collision. Often when receiving information that would shock or confuse others, my mind goes right to a name collision issue.

Origins of David Brown

My first name comes from the Bible, like a lot of names. King David, from the old testament, is one of the most documented figures in the bible. From killing Goliath in his youth, to his adultery with Bathsheba and finally a peaceful death. There is no other David that is more well known, Wikipedia simply refers to him as David.

My last name doesn’t have as deep a history. Most of the Browns are in the United States. My guess is that the name is probably a mutation of a European name. Most of my origins are northern European, Danish or English.

As the majority of the people in the United States are immigrants of some kind. I know my grandparents on my mothers side immigrated from England and are of both English and Danish descent. The origins of my fathers side is less clear, my thought is that the Browns have been in the United States for so long that we forgot to care about origins beyond where we are.

Name Collisions

The most notable name collision in my mind was when I graduated high school. During that time I had to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid before going on to college. I got some odd corrections from the government about address and name changes on the form. I submitted a correction and put it out of my head. Later, I got another correction, this time with even more errors than before including phone numbers.

After calling the phone number my family realized that there was another David Brown, born on the same day. Additionally, we realized that we also shared the same Social Security Number (SSN). After that small realization, we had to answer a critical question, “Who really owns the SSN?” As the other person should apply for a new number.

This was the first time I felt the confusion of a name collision and consequences that might befall me because of it.

Since then, I’ve been skeptical of every interaction with anyone, especially when they try to accuse me of wrong doing (however minor it might be).

I’ve gotten phone calls from legitimate utilities and other services claiming that I owed them for months of service that I didn’t pay for. In reality I had service with them and properly discontinued the services years ago and they called the wrong customer to collect.

I’ve been assigned training for work duties that make no sense for a computer programmer who sits at a desk all day. Turns out there’s another David Brown at work who’s a building engineer and is responsible for the buildings we work in.

I’ve been given the, “You’re a bad parent, your child has too many absences” talk from schools. In reality, my daughter is a perfect student and they called the wrong parents.

The list goes on…

Conclusions

As a software developer I find it frustrating and disappointing when an application or website tracks users based on name. There are less and less of those kind of websites as most new web technologies are built on platforms that handle names properly. However, the recent name collisions I get are when internal independent systems are used to infer higher level state by a person and they get it wrong.

The software tools out there do really well collecting and managing things. However, in large organizations the relationships between things are more important than the things themselves. Those relationships are managed and curated by people who are fallible. We need to do a better job of data interchange between software systems and build that capability into our software by default.