[somenomadicguy]

One could change #40 to: You need your customers' names. I look at a name the same way I look at a username, more frequently than not it's a hassle you don't need to solve. In many applications a username, or even better, an email address, is the best UUID for a user.

We design apps to collect names by default, even when we don't need them and will never use them for any purpose, or at worse, the purpose we use them for is violation of privacy.

[thr0waway1239]

Suppose someone calls in and tells you they want to cancel but forgot which email address they used for signup, what is the next piece of information you ask them?

[somenomadicguy]

Sure, that's a reasonable corner case to be concerned with. But, what if you forgot what fake name you gave them? Or what if your name is John Smith and so are 50,000 others in their database?

While designing or refactoring an app, ask yourself, "Do I really need her name or address? Will I risk their privacy and security if my database is compromised? What will I do with this information? Will I sell it to advertisers, or will I ignore it? Will I alienate any potential customers by following the first-name last-name standard?

Really, this has me thinking, WHY do we have a last name? It's basically nationalism for families. "I am Eric, the son of John Smith!" .. So what? Who cares what your family's name was? Think about it. The only time anybody has ever addressed me with my full-name it was in a government context. Are two names really required for a UUID? Why only two? Why not four?

[majewsky]

The easiest solution is to have their address on file, and send them an actual letter to confirm the cancellation.

[thr0waway1239]

And if there are multiple tenants (e.g. roommates), who will it be addressed to? Just wondering if the issue is as simple as leaving the entire name field as a nullable string.

[vidarh]

Your address entry needs to be flexible enough to accommodate pretty much arbitrary text. There are no universally required fields for addresses. Zip/postal codes are almost universal, but not entirely. E.g. "name; town; country" is sufficient some places; "name; postcode + town; country" is very common, but it can also go to the opposite extreme of a ridiculous number of separate items, so it's best to just give a number of lines and width that is constrained by your address labels, and let people figure out how best to address things to themselves.

If you need to make you address pretty much free form anyway, it makes practically no difference to ask people to put their address including name. If you ask for a name, the problem is that the name they may want you to use in other contexts is not necessarily the same name that people they live with will recognise them by.

E.g. consider a trans person that want you to know them as one gender, but isn't out to their family.

The safest in general is to not ask for "just" a name, but ask "what should we call you in context X?" but in many cases you can forgo the name by not synthesising data items (such as an address) from multiple parts, but letting users provide the whole thing as one entity (you can still pre-populate based on most common patterns), which as a bonus saves you from other stupid mistakes.

[thr0waway1239]

I agree with everything you are saying, but you ended your comment with "what should we call you in context X?". "What should we call you in context X" is, at least in the context of the current discussion, the same as a non-nullable string for the name field. Or am I misunderstanding your comment?

To add to my previous comment, what if two or more people from the same address are signed up for your service? How would you help them distinguish between the correspondence each one gets from your company?

[vidarh]

I'm saying that you need to be more specific. Just asking for name and having a non-nullable field for it runs straight into this problem, because the user will not know whether you are asking for their legal name, what they want to be called on the site, or what they want you to put an address label when physically mailing them, all three of which may be different.

> To add to my previous comment, what if two or more people from the same address are signed up for your service? How would you help them distinguish between the correspondence each one gets from your company?

By asking "what should we call you when mailing you?" (if you insist on a name field) or "which address (including name) should we use when mailing you?" You could then if you wish pre-populate any variation of name you might have on file for them in those fields; the point is that the more you focus on gathering the specific information you need for that specific context, the fewer wrong assumptions you will be making about what the user would actually prefer.

[somenomadicguy]

I have a very, very generic name. I lived in a hacker warehouse a lifetime ago where there were 3 of us with the same exact name, so yeah, the address part alone isn't that important.I always make up a fake address, often a police station or a garbage dump, and treat that address as a throwaway.