Ask anyone with western name who moved to Japan (or a myriad of other countries, but I am in process of doing the same right now so it hits close to home) whether the state has a single source of truth for their name.
It may be the source of truth, but it's not a very good one.
The USA doesn’t really have a civil registry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_registration#United_Stat...:
“In the United States, vital records such as birth certificates, death certificates, and frequently marriage certificates are maintained by the Office of Vital Statistics or Office of Vital Records in each individual state. Other documents such as deeds, mortgage documents, name change documents, and divorce records, as well as marriage certificates for those states not centralizing these records, are maintained by the clerk of court of each individual county. However, the term 'civil registry' is not used.”
I think that means your marriage may be documented in county C1, your subsequent divorce in county C2, and your name change in county C3, none of which need be in your state of birth.
In Germany, it is intended to be hard to change your name; in the USA, the situation is different. Also in Germany, if you change your name voluntarily (without having a very good reason (CLARIFICATION: of course marriage is a good reason)), this is considered to be a strong sign that you deeply hate your parents (and did the name change because of that). Indeed, the people who I know who changed their first name to their middle name exactly did it because if this.
This is in fact one of the iconic places where lack of diversity in software teams cause problems. Men may have a blind spot around name changes that women don’t, because of their lived experience.
Huh? I’m German and I have never heard of this.
I am also German. The only people (in Germany) who I know and did a (forename) name change did this because they hated their parents, since changing the name is an open signal that you deeply hate what the parents did to you your whole life (including giving you your old name).
But they're the closest thing we have that would be acceptable to most people. Better suggestion?
But the security problems are real and very annoying, even with a "normal" name. For some silly historical reason, my middle name has two different spellings depending on which official document you're looking at, which causes no end of problems. Conversely, I know people with very simple, common names, the kind where two people born in the same city on the same day have the same name, that suffer a load of different but equally frustrating issues.
These problems, however, aren't just limited to computer systems [0]. Border officers, bank clerks and government officials and other general bureaucrat types are all just as bad as a strict strcmp implementation.
The issue is that many people operating in an official capacity seem to work under the assumption that a name is a globally unique identifier that has exactly one representation, but that's not how names work in any culture.
On the other hand, if not names, then what? Combined with birth dates, it's the closest thing we have to a globally recognised unique immutable identifier, and any better alternative is going to feel invasive and face a lot of opposition on privacy grounds.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA