My name, like Shaun's, is towards the other end of the rarity spectrum from Steve Jones, so if I google for it, most of the entries on the first 5 pages are mine (a couple refer to my father). In fact, if I search for my surname most of the entries are about fairly close relatives (there are a handfull relating to people called "Don Gray"). My brother prepared a family tree a few years ago which showed that there were actually only 324 people he could find in the world with the surname Dongray and they were all closely related. Hence I'm fairly certain that my name in unique.

I don't know how this affects the chance of identity theft, since my data shadow can clearly be linked to me. As an example, I recently joined Facebook; within 2 days, someone I hadn't been in touch with for a couple of years contacted me and after a couple of weeks, someone I was at school with over 30 years ago linked me as a 'friend'. This indicates the double-edged nature of having a rare name; when people see it, they assume it's me, which is good if it is, but could be disastrous if my identity ever gets stolen.

What action do I take to limit my 'shadow'? Very little, except to maintain links to many of my past email addresses and try to minimise change to either my email address or phone number (I've kept the same mobile/cell number for 11 year and use an email address linked to a domain registered to me over 5 years ago). I do have an alternate "nickname" I use on many sites, but even there I tend to maintain the same name so that, if someone wanted to, they could easily link it to me.

Obviously, I only sign up for accounts I actually want (whether bank, credit card, book club membership or forum discussion) since these tend to persist for years, and also only fill in the minimum information they require; for example, on this site, I have no contact information (apart from the registration email), no personal info, no signature, no avatar and no photo, since none of this is needed for my discussions of SQL. Of course, a little searching would probably get most of my personal info off the net, but there's no point broadcasting it!

Does any of this do any good?

All I can say is I haven't had my identity stolen ... yet! 🙂 My feeling (hope?) is that if someone wanted to steal an identity they'd choose a name that was more common to avoid the possibility of being found out too quickly. When your name's Steve Jones, people will say "I knew a Steve Jones when I was at school"; when your name's Derek Dongray they say "I was at XYZ school at the same time as you in 19xx"!