Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by onion2k 1262 days ago
there might come a day when I have to do some reputation control should someone impersonate me

Why would anyone need to have the same name as you to impersonate you? They just have to say "I am toddm!", and the internet will generally accept it.

1 comments

The point is that since there's ~nobody with his first/last name combo people will assume it was him. Whereas if there were many people with his first/last name combo he'd have a default defense (it wasn't me). In fact he wouldn't have to defend at all since whoever does a background check would immediately see that there are multiple people by that name.
Sure, but that's just a simple case of mistaken identity. Impersonation is deliberately pretending to be someone. The uniqueness of your name doesn't help at all then.
Fair enough, if you want to impersonate you can always add a photo to disambiguate, even a John Smith.