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Are you a member of the same club as me? If so, the following story will be familiar. I am booking a flight. The online form instructs me that I must enter the passenger’s name “as appears in their travel document”. I add my surname — O’Connor — as it appears in my passport. The website refuses to let me proceed. It adds another — entirely contradictory — instruction. “Please use letters without accents and avoid using special characters!”
Welcome to life online if you have a “special character” in your name. It’s an interesting sort of problem: infuriating to some; invisible to most. Yet it presents a question which matters to everyone. Should machines adapt to humans in all their variety, or should humans flatten themselves to be acceptable to machines?
First, a quick rundown of life with a name computers hate. Airline websites are particularly stressful, because often your only choice is to leave out the bit which offends the machine, and hope you don’t have problems at the airport (I never have, but the worry persists). Other error messages are inadvertently offensive. “Name is invalid” is a common one. I once had “Last name must be filled in English”.
The issues don’t stop there. I receive so many parcels addressed to “Sarah O’Connor” that I barely notice any more. Then there are the occasions where one person has entered my name into a database, and now a different person is searching for it. “You’re not in our system” is a little annoying if it’s a restaurant reservation, but can be quite alarming if it’s a hospital appointment. Did they search for the slightly curly version of the apostrophe, or the straight one? Have they tried looking for “O’Connor”?
When I posted about this on social media, I was inundated with similar stories from people whose names contained hyphens, accents or spaces. I also heard from people whose names were deemed by online forms to be too long, or too short.
More than 30 years after the World Wide Web began, why do these problems persist? One explanation is technical. An apostrophe, for example, can be used by hackers in an “SQL injection attack”. But this is no longer much of an excuse. Computer programmers told me there were ways to handle this risk. Indeed, well-programmed systems can handle special characters perfectly well. But there are still lazy or rushed programmers out there, and even good programmers don’t always want to trust that all the other systems that need to interact with their system have also been programmed well. So even now, it can seem safer to simply reject the “tricky” characters.
The other explanation is more straightforward: many programmers make ill-informed assumptions about what names actually exist. In 2010, technologist and writer Patrick McKenzie wrote a witty online essay called “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names”. McKenzie tells me he didn’t think it would be “much of anything” at the time. But it has become a canonical text in the world of programmers. “It’s the best-distributed thing I’ve ever written — read by millions of people at this point,” he says. But although awareness of the problem has grown, he said there were “many millions of computer systems left to fix, and the work continues”.
Does it really matter? While I would classify the problem as infuriating but surmountable, people trying to operate outside of their native language or culture, or who lack digital skills or confidence, can become really stuck. “If they do not share some of the advantages that we share, that is the end of the engagement for them — they simply don’t get the thing they want from society,” McKenzie says. That risk is only going to grow as government and financial services become ever more digitised — especially if human support staff are replaced by chatbots.
Then there is the quieter danger: that human names slowly become less diverse, less unusual, less upsetting to machines, as people opt for convenience over history and identity in an increasingly online world.
That being said, if certain gloomy technologists are right, and the future will be dominated by machines that are immensely powerful but not necessarily benevolent, there might be some advantages to having a name that renders you digitally invisible. As a few wags have pointed out, if Sarah Connor’s ancestors hadn’t dropped the O’, maybe the Terminator wouldn’t have been able to find her.
I am not machine-readable. There is a certain subversive pleasure to that sentence. I might even put it on a badge. Fellow members of the club: let me know if you want one.
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