your marketing materials are deadnaming me again

I first came across the term deadnaming quite recently, which might seem quite odd for someone who doesn't use the same name as they were given when a child (I don't) but firstly in my family selecting a different name in teenage years is common practice (all part of growing up - every one of my sisters made a similar transition) and secondly pretty much nobody calls me by my childhood name, largely because I don't have any friends I'm in regular contact with who also knew me as a child.

It may also have something to do with the fact that when I changed my name from a gender neutral to a gender inappropriate name, I was making a statement about gender, but not one of conformity. It was more a statement of anti-gender, an acknowledgement of disruptive nature, like punk clothes, tattoos, or too many piercings. In that, I was just part of a general loosening of cultural norms, and accepting my name went alongside all of those other things.

But in recent years, there has been a growing trend for marketing emails from companies of which I am a customer to address me by first name. This has been followed by online systems of which I am a listed user (online administration systems, moodles, etc.) starting to do the same. The vagaries of registration systems means that sometimes I can use my initials, but sometimes that won't validate. My documentation (and indeed some of these systems) include my used name, but most places which address you by name draw from the master First Name field, not preferred first name.

So it is that there is a constant dip dip drip of automated systems addressing me by a name I don't use. It's dislocating, irritating and occasionally distressing, if it catches me at low ebb, like a reminder of old battles I don't want to fight again. In particular one provider of services, who uses a friendly chummy tone and FIRST NAME IN CAPITALS in the email headers of all its contacts with me (which really does make it look like spam or scam) has me pretty much constantly annoyed with them (it is a company that seems to derive a certain satisfaction from dissatisfied customers).

Complaining and correcting can sometimes be done (although it's not practical and sometimes not possible within some systems, and hard to predict which it will be before you start the process). But fundamentally, I don't want to be an exception. In this world, there are names people are called, and suggesting they do things using those names often makes those things more likely to be done. Acknowledged. There are also the names on their passports, Doctor's records and birth certificates. These are often not the same, for many people. The changes can be big or small, but we hear them. We hear them all.

Don't cross the beams. If you're talking formally, keep it formal and and keep FIRST NAME down in official spaces (For the Attention of: X, Dear X, According to our records your name is X). If you're striking an informal note (Hi X, Hello X!) make sure that field is draws from a preferred name field or is user editable. Otherwise that name will have precisely the opposite effect to the intended.



 

on the difficulty of avoiding data devalidation

As is my wont, I was updating my website. In this case the key product I was linking to was the NHS Service Finder database. I smacked through a sample search (like you do) and my eye snagged on a thing halfway down the page. A thing I knew had not existed since 2011.

So I went to the button, you know the button, the one that opens a challenging half-remembered route to the data curators who keep your information in a reasonable state of validation (my memory ran something along these lines; there's some forms, and a phone number and a guy and a thing you have to do, but he knows his stuff so it's OK) but the button was gone, and in its place was a simple line of text: "This information was supplied by Serco Global Services on 12-03-2014"

OK, I thought. New route. "Report an issue with this information" link. Insta-auto-holding-reply received. Take it from there. Then I thought to myself, I wonder if [redacted] service is still there?

It was. Four years gone and repeatedly removed from everyone's databases.

But (and this is really the but) it persists, haunting the local databases, or those that don't (or barely) update, linked to long-gone web content, or copies of that content, or copies of copies of that content. We're guilty of it, to an extent ourselves; one of the sources I found was (or at least appeared) official, or from the right source, though I think it was a random scrap lost on a server somewhere.

 24 hours later, I get the email from the person. "This information has been passed to our third party information supply service. Please be advised it may take as long as 6 weeks for any changes to be reflected in the database."

Spare a thought for the information curators. I think about them a lot. Specifically I try to think about how to encourage them to try the emails and phone numbers they copy from database to database. Because they're dead, every one of them. The email, the phone number, even the web address (which was a surprise to me, I thought it was redirect to current content and oh, another thing for fixing).

We never want to throw away data, us humans. I remember the days I kept a careful list of all my database deletions, a list of the discontinuations, each with a justification that no-one would ever ask for. The services, clubs, groups, activities that make you go ooh! are the worst, persisting and re-entering for the sake of being interesting, that common currency of the internet.

Well, I have work to do. Time to attend to the synaptic pruning of the semantic web. 

A final note on skipping the email and phone call stage of three-point data validation and just relying on the web search; Google is adjusting its search around you constantly. If it looks like you're searching for evidence of long-discontinued services, it will give you evidence of long-discontinued services. And if you find yourself thinking, "ooh, that sounds like an interesting service," beware. Others have gone ooh before you.