What’s in a Name?

I travel a fair amount. It’s not something I enjoy doing, especially since my ill-fated attempt at airplane commuting, but it’s something I do. Every four weeks or so I’ll find myself in line in front of a jetway, getting set to get inside an aluminum tube to go somewhere.

Last week I went to San Francisco for a night for a conference. Burbank Airport, valet, gate A2. Very standard. I was A12, so lined up when we were supposed to. The Southwest ritual usually has everyone glancing at everyone else's boarding passes to figure out where to stand. I do the same. Sometimes you catch a name, sometimes just the place number.

When I landed at SFO I made my way to the car and my phone buzzed in my pocket with a Linked In request. Nothing super unusual, but the message attached was:

“______ would like to connect with you on Linked In.”

But then the kicker.

“Hi there. I saw your name on your boarding pass, and I know it sounds weird, but I Googled you. Like you I have two kids, but I don’t fly airplanes. It seems you have an interesting job!”

Paranoia, jacked to 11.

As a test I Googled my name. I’m not a professor of economics. That Ethan Kaplan has had a really good career and I applaud him. Especially because he’s been notable enough to get an uncontested Wikipedia entry. But I’m the second one there, and sure enough there’s a nice head shot of me that Fender took.

And my blog. Stories of my kids. Airplanes, R.E.M.. I’ve managed to compartmentalize my interests into very specific things, and they are all there.

So here we are. A name, a search and a Linked In request.

The next day on the way home I did this in reverse. Using my sort of useful photographic memory, I memorized the names and faces of my immediate line-mates at Oakland airport and on the plane, within five minutes, compiled little dossiers each one of them. It took five minutes a piece, on airplane Wi-Fi. Kids names, occupations, mutual friends (in two cases), the kinds of cars they drove.

Five minutes. There was no social engineering involved, just knowing where to search. All public data through Google and some boolean searching.

Periodically people freak out about privacy.

Google, Facebook, Apple know too much.

The kicker is, we let them, we give them this information. Our permanent selves aren’t transient but instead the accumulation of the digital detritus we put out there. It just takes a name to unlock it. A name, some context and half a brain.

The specter of the pantopicon has shrunk to the extent that the name we’re given at birth is the last vestige of the privacy we want. It’s the last thing we can protect.

Good luck.