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Codebreaker

Google CEO: You’ll be able to get a new identity when you reach adulthood.

John Moe Aug 16, 2010
Codebreaker

Google CEO: You’ll be able to get a new identity when you reach adulthood.

John Moe Aug 16, 2010

It’ll just be one of those growing up things: go to college or get a job, be eligible to vote, change your name to escape your shameful online past.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicts a future when changing your name, changing your identity, becomes commonplace. Because the internet will know so much about you- so much more than now even, given how we live more and more of our lives online:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

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