[caymanjim]

> to disambiguate the surprisingly rare case of two customers with the exact same name

I see you have an uncommon name.

My first+last are shared by about 20,000 people in the US. From 2005-2020 I was unable to check-in for airlines online or even at the kiosk at the airport. I had to wait on line for baggage check-in despite never checking a bag, and they'd take my ID into the back room and delay me for 15 minutes and whisper and glare at me the whole time. Thankfully I can finally fly like a normal person again.

When I worked at a large company, there were four other people with the same first name, middle initial, and last name.

There is nothing surprising or rare about two customers having the same name.

[kshacker]

No me, well me too but not that bad, but my wife. Sometimes in the 200x era on green card, she will always get called for secondary inspection. Oh you entered this airport on this date. How are you re-entering without going out. "Well we did not. Not traveled for a year." But you did. All bags searched, more q&a and then they let her go. A couple of times they mentioned that the other person with the same name had the same date of birth. But the passport / green card number had to be different, no? I guess it took them that half hour to figure out and maybe the 200x AI matched by name and date of birth :)

But the sequel: a few years later I get a bill from a hospital for copay for delivery/childbirth. I call to contest ... we did not even live there any more, did at some point of time but years apart ... but they are adamant that my wife gave birth, at that hospital, on that date, in that city, and maybe she never informed me :) it was almost that weird. I don't act on it and give them a statement that it is not me/my family. Then another bill (or a final notice) a couple of years later. And then finally something clicks ... I used to work in a team where when I moved out, someone replaced me and his name was also same as me. Reach out to him, and his wife's name is same as mine, and they lived in the same city we lived in.

So someone somewhere fat fingered the wrong account when searching by name. He acknowledged the account (and childbirth) and paid up. I unfortunately did not ask him about his wife's date of birth to solve the immigration mystery.

My suspicion has been at my past employer's HR or legal department mixing up files

[thwarted]

It's rich that the cohort that sees identity verification and real names policies as necessary and meaningful also doesn't seem to understand the first thing about identity and names.

[inigyou]

It just has to chill your speech. It doesn't have to not mess up your life, as long as it chills your speech.

[miki123211]

AFAIK, many governments use name+surname+DOB as the unique identifier for a person, E.G. when looking up somebody who doesn't have any documents on them, or initiating a document recovery process if you've been robbed and don't remember anything else.