You can't change my username, but you don't have to refer to me by my official username. Furthermore, it's ok that my government ID doesn't say daveFNbuck even though I'm using it as my name here.
There are almost no situations where people refer to me by the name in my government records, and that's fine. Those records still work for their intended purpose and there's no need to update them to match my nicknames or aliases.
The issue here isn’t that Google got the name wrong, but that they actively chose a new one and could change it to the new one because the public depends on a private entity’s map system and that private entity is able to manipulate the representation in their own private interest.
>If< I didn’t like you and I were able to change your name on every non-public record to “Fucking Idiot” (Job applications, Facebook, Twitter, GMail, etc.), maybe you wouldn’t mind that. Or maybe you would mind it and I convinced you to not mind it by explaining how it wouldn’t effect your government records. (I doubt the residents in question mind the name “The East Cut” either, but they already had one and preferred it. In many of these name changes, the effects can mean rapid mass development, raised rents and evictions, etc.) For you, this name change would mean at least a lot of explaining how this obnoxious poster on Hacker News was trying to make some disparate point but it has nothing to do with your qualification for the job, getting your account banned from Social media sites. You could start a new one but you’d lose all your posts and followers. At the end of the day, you should probably have been able to stop me, but you couldn’t.
If Google were doing something malicious that caused real and important harm, I'd probably agree with you that what they were doing was wrong. I don't see the harm here, and I don't see malice. They weren't doing this capriciously, they were doing this at the behest of a nonprofit created by the community.
Right. If nothing harmful has been reported by New York Times by now, then I’m sure nothing could ever go wrong.
I’m critiquing the shape of the system and the potential for harm. The municipal duties our ancestors fought to have managed through democratic processes we love to pride ourselves on are swiftly being surrendered to private corporations who citizens widely do not trust. And then we wait until the damage is irreversible and pretend we weren’t asking for it.
I don't think our ancestors fought to ensure that mapmaking could only be done through democratic processes. The usual story we like to tell ourselves about this country is that our ancestors fought to give us freedom, not to ensure that the government would have the final say on how we're allowed to identify our neighborhoods.
You say you critiqued the potential for harm and that you've warned me, but I don't believe that you've done that. You've explained how similar changes to other systems could potentially harm me, but you haven't explained how changing neighborhood names on Google maps could lead to harm.
How many people will need to start calling you “daveFNfuck” before HN mods should change your username to “daveFNfuck”?