If a new identity is the only way to escape your online past, maybe Facebook just isn't worth it.
You know something seismic has happened to society when a serious businessman suggests that a name change might become an automatic entitlement for young people who want to put any online indiscretions behind them. I won't pretend I'm young, but if you're like me and have formed an attachment to
your name, this sounds drastic.
Suppose, though, that your birth name is Eric Schmidt. You've lived out your teens on Facebook, your page decorated like a bedroom wall with photos of you and your friends intoxicated with youthful high spirits (not to mention the sort poured from a bottle).
Your page has heartfelt - and frank - references to important milestones on life's journey: your love/hate for some kid/teacher at school; the thrill/hangover of an illicit sexual/drug-taking experience.
Before you know it, school and university are behind you and you're embarking on a career. However, Facebook - and your Facebook friends - are still part of your life and, more to the point, your life is part of Facebook and the world wide web.
It is now, the senior executive of a leading internet company told the Wall Street Journal this month, that a young person might want to put some distance between themselves and the online hijinks which might otherwise come back to haunt them. Simple, he said: dump your old name for a new one.
If this had come from the 26-year-old boss of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, or one of Google's founders, Sergey Brin or Larry Page, all of whom might be said to have grown up on the internet, perhaps it wouldn't have been that surprising.
But the speaker was Google's 55-year-old chief executive, actual name Eric Schmidt, who spent decades at old-school computer hardware and software companies Sun Microsystems and Novell before going to Google. If he sounds remarkably offhand about the weighty matter of changing your name, he's actually alerting us to a major issue.
The world's 500 million Facebook users - not to mention the tens of millions more who inhabit other public parts of the internet - make it pitifully easy for their lives to be splashed across the front page of this and any other rag should they suddenly become newsworthy.
Negligible journalistic cunning is required to type a name into Facebook and see what comes up - and what's there is free for the taking. Suddenly, a name change - or complete avoidance of Facebook and the like - doesn't seem such an extreme idea.
Schmidt isn't against Facebook - and how could he be, given Google's role in propagating online content, and ownership of YouTube, another potential source of embarrassment for the indiscreet.
In fact, he calls Facebook a "company of consequence". Had he said "consequences" he would have been right, too.
A new book reveals that in 2007 Google was prepared to invest in Facebook at a level that would have valued the 3-year-old company at US$15 billion.
This was at a time when Microsoft, too, was wooing Facebook, according to The Facebook Effect, by former Fortune writer David Kirkpatrick, who interviewed Zuckerberg and other Facebook leading lights.
The book tells how Facebook has gone from being an online yearbook for Harvard students to having signed up about 7.5 per cent of the world's population. Today its revenue from advertising is pushing US$1 billion ($1.4 billion) and it has about 1600 employees.
Microsoft won the tussle to invest, paying US$240 million for 1.6 per cent of the company, and a former Google advertising hotshot, Sheryl Sandberg, joined Facebook as second in command.
Zuckerberg, said by Kirkpatrick to be ambivalent about ads and happy to leave that side of Facebook to Sandberg, does, however, attempt to grapple with the issue Schmidt raised. The problem is, privacy is in direct conflict with sharing, Facebook's whole purpose.
In late May, after Facebook's privacy - or lack of it - made international headlines, Zuckerberg blogged about having made changes to simplify privacy settings. He sounded sincere enough, but growth in new user numbers in the US fell by 96 per cent the following month.
There seems no such hesitancy here. According to California market researcher Inside Network, 1.68 million Kiwis are on Facebook, or 39.2 per cent of us, with the number expected to reach 2.12 million in 12 months.
Sincerity, it seems, can't completely compensate for naivety. Zuckerberg, who has resisted opportunities to sell the business he still controls, is fond of saying that he wants to change the world: "I think we can make the world a more open place." While it's a sentiment hundreds of millions of people are clearly willing to go along with, who's prepared to at the price Schmidt puts on it? Not me.
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist
