anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them.
There should be a list of false things people coming from common law jurisdictions believe about how choice of identity works on the rest of the globe.
I’m not sure what’s intended by “appropriate” there—it might not be so much a claim about the law as a claim that it’s a name the person wants to use and you shouldn’t argue with them about it.
Sometimes a user puts something in a “name” field that they do not actually intend to be used to identify themselves.
They may be trying to get that string displayed to other users in a highlighted fashion. If someone puts “Wal-Mart Sucks” in the name field on a blog comment, it isn’t because they seriously want to be identified by the surname of Sucks. They’re just saying that Wal-Mart sucks, in a dramatic way.
They may be trying to break the system in one way or another. If someone puts their name as “Robert’; drop table students; --” then depending on the social and technical context they might be giving themselves a clever alias; or they might be trying to attack the database.
There’s also the possibility of accidentally entering wrong characters—I assume this is unlikely since people should know how to type their names, but people have to type their names so much that even a low chance of fumble-fingers is going to occur now and then.
Incidentally, there are many cases where I don’t care about my username at all and have to come up with something. I’d find it acceptable if they’d just give me a number and a password, or let me register just with a password (perhaps provided by them?), maybe plus e-mail.
From Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names:
There should be a list of false things people coming from common law jurisdictions believe about how choice of identity works on the rest of the globe.
I’m not sure what’s intended by “appropriate” there—it might not be so much a claim about the law as a claim that it’s a name the person wants to use and you shouldn’t argue with them about it.
Even then, impersonation is an issue..
Sometimes a user puts something in a “name” field that they do not actually intend to be used to identify themselves.
They may be trying to get that string displayed to other users in a highlighted fashion. If someone puts “Wal-Mart Sucks” in the name field on a blog comment, it isn’t because they seriously want to be identified by the surname of Sucks. They’re just saying that Wal-Mart sucks, in a dramatic way.
They may be trying to break the system in one way or another. If someone puts their name as “Robert’; drop table students; --” then depending on the social and technical context they might be giving themselves a clever alias; or they might be trying to attack the database.
All fair enough.
There’s also the possibility of accidentally entering wrong characters—I assume this is unlikely since people should know how to type their names, but people have to type their names so much that even a low chance of fumble-fingers is going to occur now and then.
Or their mom might be a hacker.
Incidentally, there are many cases where I don’t care about my username at all and have to come up with something. I’d find it acceptable if they’d just give me a number and a password, or let me register just with a password (perhaps provided by them?), maybe plus e-mail.