Changing your name is a hard unsolved problem in Computer Science

The nerdy joke is that there are only 2 hard problems in computer science:

1. Naming things
2. Cache invalidation
3. Off by one errors

I've recently had the interesting experience of changing my name. I have my name: the one I use on a daily basis, the one I identify with, the one to which I actually respond. I also have the name I was born under, or my "deadname" in the colloquial trans parlance. I dont really identify with this name any more, but it follows me around like a spectre haunting Europe. There's now a noticeable gap between me hearing my deadname and realising someone's referring to me. It's fun to see how quickly those things change.

So, this brings me to my primary conceit for this post. We, as an industry, are horrible at accepting name changes for folks. In this post I'll give some examples of things I've seen done wrong. I'll show you how you can make your application better for folks who are changing their name. Lets dive in!

Google accounts, and single sign-on

Disclaimer, I work for Google. This section is my opinion and my best understanding, and does not represent the opinions, or views of Google LLC, or Alphabet Inc. In my opinion Google has done a lot to make changing ones name easy, which I really appreciate, but some folks using Google APIs don't do the best integration here

There are two types of Google accounts, individual, and GSuite Google's business offering. Each Google account has one primary email address, and zero or more aliases associated with it. The most important thing to know is that the primary email address can change on the same account.

So if you're [email protected], you can become [email protected]. When you do that you keep your account, inbox, and all your Google apps access under the same account. Under the hood there's a stable identifier that's associated with the account that does not change when the email address changes. In other words, an email address is not the primary key of a Google account. When you change your Google email address, Google sets up a permanent, undeletable, alias for the old email address. This means if you send an email to the old address, the person will receive it. However, I suspect if you ask most folks, they'd tell you they don't want to see it.

If your application implements single sign-on with Google, you should key off the stable ID, and not the email adress or name. if you store the email and name in your database, you should change them if Google tells you they has changed.

Let's look at the mechanics of how you can implement this with Google's OAuth APIs. I set up the basic OAuth workflow in Rails, and the first details that came back from my account were (partially redacted):

 {"provider"=>"google", "uid"=>"113017XXXXXXXX8346486", "info"=>  {"name"=>"Penelope Phippen",   "email"=>"[email protected]",   "unverified_email"=>"[email protected]",   "email_verified"=>true,   "first_name"=>"Penelope",   "last_name"=>"Phippen",   "image"=>"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Tj-GuDdntsY/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/ACHi3rfGmAsSR_4ZenyOeMkId6EERxmFIg/s50-c/photo.jpg"},

Now, it's worth noting, the email address associated with this account used to be different. Every time you do an OAuth exchange with this account, it'll give you the new email address and name. So, the right thing to do here is update your user record with the new email address and name every time you get a new OAuth payload back. If a user's name has changed, you can assume it's intentional, and update from that. The thing that will always be stable is the uid field, which actually comes from the sub field in the raw OAuth response.

Let me change my username, you cowards.

The next is the family of applications which have their own auth. Before email became the standard way to identify users, we had the username. Many applications have long since migrated off letting users specify usernames. Those apps are now authenticating only with email address.

I've found that certain applications don't let you change your username. I used my deadname as my primary internet identifier up until I changed my name. If I can't change my username, and I've accumulated significant data on your application, I don't want to have to destroy my account and start a new one. This puts me in a place where your application is repeatedly deadnaming me, and I can't do anything about it. Build in fungibility of your usernames, let folks change them. Please for the love of all that is holy don't use a user provided string as a primary database key.

Don't allow for username re-use

This one is a security/harassment vehicle. On websites like GitHub and Twitter, you can change the username associated with your account, which is great. However, this introduces a new problem, what to do with the old username?

Both GitHub and Twitter allow for a username to be registered the moment that you change your old username. On Twitter, this means that when a person changes their username, you could immediately impersonate their old identity. On GitHub, this means that if people are pulling software from your old name, someone could immediately replace your repos with malware.

On both sites, I now have "squatter" accounts, that hold my old name. This is largely a security protection for myself and those who follow my work. I've written more than one pretty popular software package. People could plausibly be git cloning those packages as their dependency management strategy (please don't do this). It's worth noting GitHub does set up redirects until someone with the same username creates a repo with the same name, but a targeted attack would be almost trivial to pull off. On Twitter, I didn't want a troll occupying my old name and pretending to be me.

Here's the thing, almost certainly, re-using a username is something that you never want to have happen. Unless there's literally 0 security or harassment opportunity with your application, letting someone else occupy someone's old name is going to result in problems. The right thing to do is, most likely, just redirect everything under the old name to the new name, and not let anybody else interact with data on the old name.

Caching name off other identifiers

I first encountered this one in real life in a virtual queueing system for a restaurant. They asked me for my name, I said "Penelope'", then they asked me for my phone number. Dutifully, I gave them my phone number (which hasn't changed since I moved to the US). Then when they texted me to tell me my table was ready the text contained my deadname. Annoying, but NBD I thought. Then when I got back to the restaurant, my friends and I were treated to being told our table for [my deadname] was ready.

What's upsetting about this interaction is that I had given them my name. Whatever virtual queuing system had grabbed my name from some previous interaction with it, and then not properly invalidated it when I gave them my new name. As far as I can tell, having backtracked through their website there's no way for me to manually change my name in their system. So I expect I will just continue to get deadnamed by this system for the rest of my life. My other choice is to change my phone number, which is obviously annoying.

The lesson here is that names are fungible in relation to other identifiers. In the case of phone numbers, well, they can get recycled. A phone number belonging to only one person for an extended period of time is the exception and not the rule. In my case, this nave exception has resulted in my life now containing additional annoying and upsetting interactions.

You don't even have to use my legal name for most things

Now we come to the section of interactions where using my legal name is an admitted requirement. If you're a government organisation, financial institution, or other similar body, I understand the need for your company to know my legal name. That's fine, I'll be changing it soon, but in the meantime, I'd like to point out that you don't need to use it all the time.

To use an example, let's think about one of the investing applications I use. When I set up my account, they took my full legal name, to verify my identity. Ever since, they've emailed me using that name. Even before I changed my name, I didn't use my full legal name for most things. I used a short version. It feels weird and overly formal that all their product emails are addressed to my legal name. I can't set a different name with them. Now that I've changed my name, things reveal my legal name that absolutely 100% don't need to. A simple statement doesn't need to use my legal name. From their perspective, there's no difference between Hey <legal deadname>, here's your balance and Hey Penelope, here's your balance. Unlike a bank statement, those emails can't be used for proof of address or similar so they don't need to be so formal.

Id also like to point out that legal names can change. Changing my non-legal name has been enough of a battle with tech companies as it is, Ill be sure to detail all the things that are needed to get that legal name change everywhere in a future post. In the meantime, see if you can do some work to make it easier for folks to change how you address them in your apps.

A more extreme example of my legal name being used unnecessarily is when I'm talking with my credit card companies on the phone. They only know me by my legal identity, but it'd be vastly more comfortable for me if I could use a different name and honorific on the phone (miss instead of sir). Again, in that context there's no impact to them for doing so, but there is a huge impact on me. It's also not the sort of thing where I feel ok just being like
Hey, this seems kind of weird, but could you refer to me as Miss Phippen instead. If your application does require a legal name, please consider having fields for preferred name, pronouns, and honorific that your staff/communications can use to address folks most of the time.

Conclusions

This post hasn't even covered all the ways that you, dear reader, likely have no power to make name changes. OS X and Windows both burn your username into the OS install in such a way that you need to reinstall to ever get properly rid of it. There's a constellation of things that will probably always bare the wrong name for me. This post gives a few practical tips for fixing that, however. And I hope you can do a little to make it easier for all of us, in the locus of control you do have.

Consider this my ask to you, that if youre working on a product that involves using someones name, pronouns, or honorifics, that you make it easy to change in a self service manner. This is a basic dignity for many folks, and itd mean a lot to me.

I'm coming to this from the perspective of someone who's trans, who has changed their first name to signal a significant change in who I am. This isn't the only reason someone changes their name (see also: marriage, parents getting divorced, and myriad other reasons), but my use case has thus far worked as something of a stress test for various computer systems.

For all people, there is an essential dignity to living our lives being identified as we want to be. As you develop your computer systems, please keep the following things in mind:

• A person's name can change (and with a pretty high probability, will) once or more in their life
• A person will want to change multiple identifiers when that happens including email addresses and usernames
• if your application doesn't allow for that, the person might experience significant pain or distress because of that inflexibility
• A legal name is something that someone may wish to be not associated with frequently, and you should allow folks to give you another name against which to refer to them and then use that most of the time
• If you want to make your application more friendly to a wider set of humans you should support making those changes

Thank you so much for reading. If you liked this, please consider following me on twitter @penelope_zone.