A Different Kind of Identity Theft

Y ou may not have heard about the time George Clooney stole $300 from his employer. Clooney, then a young man, delivered meat for the Mt. Ida Meat Market in Davenport, Iowa. One day, his boss realized the market’s customers had been paying in cash directly to Clooney, who had pocketed the funds.

The reason you’re unfamiliar with this factual tidbit is that it happened in 1903. The future exploits of George Clooney, meat-profit thief, are unknown, while the exploits of George Clooney, actor and confirmed silver fox (b. 1961), are very well documented.

Fortunately for people in the analog world of the past, one rarely had to worry about one’s reputation being tarnished by a reprobate with an identical name. But in 1933, it was a troubling misfortune that over 30 families, predominantly Jewish, in New York City had the last name “Hitler” (or Hittler). Many of them rectified this problem by changing their names to similar options like “Hiller” or “Hilton.” (The frustration over this dynamic, although on a much lesser scale, is voiced by the character Michael Bolton in the movie Office Space, who complains, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”)

While we are constantly bombarded with warnings about climate change, viral lab leaks, and Rosie O’Donnell’s return to America, it seems the most likely terror to befall a common citizen is for another human with their name to become either famous or infamous, condemning them to a lifetime of having to clear up confusion over their identity.

And in the internet age, this threat has become even more pernicious. America’s most inexhaustible resource is celebrities, from legitimate movie stars to women who become household names because they answer a man-on-the-street question about sexual habits. The problem is every one of these “celebrities” has a name, and dozens of non-famous people share it.

For people who live online, their name is everything, since it is an identifier searchable by everyone in the world. And given that every local story is now a national one, there is no hiding from the identically monikered. In 1950, a plumber named George Santos living in Chandler, Ariz., or a schoolteacher named Nancy Mace in Sheboygan, Wis., could live their lives in happy obscurity. But now, with D-list celebrities gasping for attention and hoping their names careen through social media with maximum velocity, names across the nation are being spoiled.

The quantity of information sloshing around online already causes confusion among those who should know better. Last year, perpetually obnoxious Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett took to the floor to accuse her former Republican colleague, Lee Zeldin of New York, of accepting money from convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. But Crockett’s likely five minutes of Googling were insufficient; Zeldin had accepted campaign funds from a Jeffrey Epstein, but this Epstein was a doctor, not the late disgraced financier. Crockett never owned up to her mistake.

Once a name is befouled in public, it is difficult to claw it back to respectability. And online, these names are distributed worldwide, not just within the reach of a newspaper’s print edition. Last week, the New York Post reported on a Florida teacher who was arrested on three counts of inappropriately messaging teenage students, and who happens to share the name of yours truly. In the past, I have actually penned columns for the Post — so visitors searching my name on their website will find articles mentioning either Christian Schneider the occasional columnist or Christian Schneider the accused child groomer. (Other members of the club include a Nazi German chemist and the composer of the insufferable “Gummy Bear Song,” one of the first videos to go viral on YouTube.)

Several websites use Social Security Administration data to tally how many people share certain names, so clustering is easy to measure. For instance, there are 191 Donald Trumps in America, 189 of whom you likely haven’t seen on the news. There are 18 George Clooneys, 31 Taylor Swifts, 87 Tom (or Thomas) Hankses, and 26 Jerry Seinfelds. Thank goodness Jay-Z picked a hip-hop sobriquet, or he might be confused for the 358 other Shawn Carters. But the most popular famous-person name might be Michael Jordan, which is so ubiquitous (2,333) that there is an actor with the same name who is nearly as celebrated as the greatest basketball player of all time. (Michael B. Jordan is the Michael Jordan of alternate Michael Jordans.)

So if you are a parent who wants to guarantee your child a unique identity, what do you do? For one, you can give your baby a rare name unlikely to be shared by people who crop up randomly in the news.

According to the SSA, this is exactly what is happening. The fastest-rising names in popularity in America are ones few people would recognize even a decade ago. Gone are the Toms and Amys and Elizabeths and Richards. In are Kasai, Akari, Eziah, and Jasai (for boys) and Klarity, Rynlee, Ailanny, and Naylani (for girls). Between 1950 and 2010, “Michael” sat at either No. 1 or 2 in popularity. It has now fallen out of the top 10 to No. 16, behind fast-rising names like Mateo, Levi, and Sebastian.

Growing diversity in America has a lot to do with shifts in the popularity of specific names. With different cultures come different ways of naming children. For years, African-American comedians have ribbed their own community for their creativity in concocting baby names, from a 1995 Saturday Night Live sketch that posited names like Noxema and Algebra to Key and Peele’s famous football player introduction video. (Although the fictional “Hingle McCringleberry” doesn’t hold a candle to the very real former college quarterback General Booty.)

The statistics demonstrate that younger parents are now granting their children more unique names. Psychology professor Jean Twenge found that between 2004 and 2006, 34 percent of boys and 24 percent of girls received one of the 50 most common names for that period. Between 2011 and 2015, only 28 percent of boys and 21 percent of girls received one of the 50 most common names for that period.

Twenge cites “cultural individualism” as a primary reason for the increasing name diversity. “Most parents in the 2010s are millennials, a generation raised to value the unique self,” Twenge has said.

None of this is a permanent fix, of course. Right now, somewhere in America, a five-year-old named Klarity is finger-painting in blissful obscurity, unaware that in 20 years she may be one bad headline away from ruining the name for every other Klarity in America. That’s the real lesson of the internet age: Anonymity isn’t a place you get to live — it’s a lease, and the rent comes due the instant someone who shares your name does something the algorithm finds interesting.

So name your kid whatever you like. Just know that somewhere, parents across America once thought “Isis” had a nice ring to it, too.