Maiden Names

I freely admit that, as a guy, I have it easy in so many ways. The tiniest things earn us big points - like remembering to put the toilet seat down - why women don't just check if the seat is up or down before sitting down is beyond me, but that's a topic for another time - or remembering to take off my wet shoes in the mudroom before I plod through the kitchen.

The fact is, though, that we have a pretty good gig.

One big bonus is that I kept my last name. I had practiced my signature thousands of times as a kid so I would be ready to scribble my name at a moments notice when adoring Blues fans pressed me for an autograph. No one's ever asked for my autograph, but my signature is largely unchanged from my youth - it wasn't legible then and it isn't legible now.

Most women of my generation took on their husband's last name when they got married; forcing them to develop an entirely new autograph.

Then along came Facebook.

If anyone from my past wanted to look me up, all they had to do was type Scott Brader into a search engine and it would bring up a number of people named Scott Brader. It isn't all that hard to figure out which one is me based on the information available. For women, though, friends from their youth who may want to track them down on Facebook have no way of doing that without knowing their married name.

The solution? Simply list yourself on Facebook with both your maiden name and your married name.

Sounds like an easy fix, right?

Well it might be easy, but I will admit that it is one that gives me pause.

One of the most important bits of information an identity thief wants to know is your mother's maiden name. After all, many accounts use a person's email address or their first initial and last name or their entire name as their user id. Knowing that, it's not too hard to click the Forgot My Password link and answer the most common security question which is, of course, What is your mother's maiden name.

This creates the potential for a bit of a quandary. After all, if a woman wants to be found by her childhood friends, then Facebook pretty much requires that you list your name as First Name Maiden Name Last Name. Now the unscrupulous person looks up some potential targets on Facebook and sees that their mother is among their friends; or the mom's posts make it obvious that she's the mom. If she listed her name by the standard format; that unscrupulous person has the mother's maiden name.

Seems like a gigantic security hole to me; and certainly one that opens up a whole world of privacy issues.

I think Facebook needs to modify their personal information to allow people to enter their name in a First Name Maiden Name Last Name fashion that searches on any combination of those names while only displaying First Name Last Name on the news feeds.

Okay, so I'm an anal retentive, geeky sort of person who finds such tidbits of information to be fascinating. Maybe no one cares. Maybe it's not a big deal to anyone else.

But it seems like a big deal to me.

That's my rant for the day.