“Oh, you are on the blacklist!”
The previous reading material, “Name Matching in Law Enforcement and Counter-Terrorism” reminds me of my experience that I was mistakenly regarded as a debtor in arrear with the payment for bill of cell phone.
About 10 years ago, when I planned to contract a cell phone for the first time, I was refused to make contract by a staff of a cell phone store because of “the past debt for a payment unpaid yet”. I asserted that this was the first time for me to intend to contract a cell phone so that I had no experience to make a late payment. But the office staff said that the one who had the same name and the same birth day as mine didn’t paid for the bill in the past –in short, “I” was on the black list–,and he couldn’t make contract with me. I had no enough time and no material to persuade the staff so that I gave up contracting on the day.
My name, Kentaro Suzuki, is a very common name. Suzuki is the second most common family name in Japan(about 1.7 million, based on telephone books). I’m not sure how many “Kentaro” are accurately in Japan. However, I believe that there are a lot of “Kentaro Suzuki”s because I can find so many “Kentaro Suzuki”s by searching with Google, which says there are 20,700 web pages that contains “Kentaro Suzuki”(searching with Japanese character) .Of course, most of these pages are not related to me. I know there is “Kentaro Suzuki” who is a former professional soccer player, a lawyer, a president of a company, a street musician,etc,etc accoding to Google. Fortunately, it seems that there is no Kentaro Suzuki who committed felony…until now!
When we plan to construct a name-matching system, solving a “homonym” name is one of crucial problems. Most used invariant attributes to identify one is “Name” and “Birthday”. However, how to distinguish ones who have the same name and birthday? “Address” and “Phone” is imperfect because they are often changed or not-updated. The universal code, such as “SSN”, is one candidate but there are no perfect universal code that covers all the people. Also, in Japan, there is no universal code such as SSN.
Anyway, this kind of system also needs well-trained registerers who can find whether a “homonym” one is really the one who have been already registered or a different one. This is a problem similar to register a book that has the same name and author in some ways.
Other than the experience described above, I have had several experiences that I was mistakenly regarded as other “Kentaro Suzuki”. I think this problem will continue for all my rest life, unless I change my family name, for example,when I get married.
Bob Glushko Said,
September 29, 2008 @ 8:07 am
It is interesting that there is no equivalent of a US Social Security Number in Japan, and I don’t think there is one in India, either. But this must enable rampant tax evasion. A person like “Kentaro Suzuki” with a common name can always claim “that source of income isn’t mine” (even if it is), and even a person with a rarer name could have “income deniability” by getting paid using a set of aliases and multiple bank accounts.
Is tax evasion common in India or Japan?
(don’t worry, we won’t report you if you tell us)
Connor Riley Said,
September 30, 2008 @ 9:47 am
Using birth date to distinguish all the Kentaro Suzukis is an especially bad idea, since the probability that two people in a group will have the same birthday is quite high for a relatively small group size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox
Laura Paajanen Said,
September 30, 2008 @ 7:20 pm
While poking around faculty websites, I noticed that Ken Goldberg also seems to have the common name problem. He links to a “Hall of Ken Goldbergs” website, which lists contact info for 24 Ken Goldbergs with a range of careers over several countries:
http://goldberg.lbl.gov/hallofkens.php
Perhaps you should start a distinguishing site too! http://www.whichkentarosuzuki.org seems to be available.
Kentaro Suzuki Said,
September 30, 2008 @ 9:27 pm
To Prof. Glushko,
>Is tax evasion common in India or Japan?
I’m not sure whether the rate of tax evasion in Japan is higher than those of other countries adopting a universal tax code system like SNN. However, there is slangs “to-go-san” or “ku-ro-yon” in Japan, which words are used to represent Japanese people’s feeling of the rate of how much one’s income Japanese IRS can capture.These slangs mean “IRS can capture infomation of 90-100% of a salaried employee’s income, but it can only capture 50-60% of a self-employed taxpayer’s income and 30-40% of a farmer’s and fisher’s”.
This is, of course, not based on accurate or fact-based statistics, because there are no official accurate statistics that display the total amount of all “true” income (If such statistics were available, IRS could have collected all “true” income tax!). But, this word shows Japanese people’s feeling of unfairness against the current income tax system.
Whether universal tax code system like SNN should be adopted or not is sometimes discussed in Japan. However, it has not been intorduced yet because there is a deep-rooted worry of “Big-Brother” among Japanese.
Kentaro Suzuki Said,
September 30, 2008 @ 9:29 pm
To Connor,
Yes, the birthday paradox is the very problem of this story. Of course, we can use the information of “year of birth” for databases. So, in this case, we have to think of not “365″ but “365*(the average life year of a person)”. But it doesn’t contribute so much to solving this problem. According to my computation with the formula on the wiki(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox#Average_number_of_people), with M = 365 * 80(assumed average life expectancy of year), the average number of people required to find a pair with the same birthday and year seems about 215. I can imagine there are many names that has over 200 people like “John Smith”…maybe “Kentaro Suzuki”.
Kentaro Suzuki Said,
September 30, 2008 @ 10:22 pm
To Laura,
Thank you for introducing a good web page! Wow, interesting… So far, I didn’t think Goldberg is so common family name. But I have to modify my assumption.
Ja, I don’t like uploading my photo, but whichkentarosuzuki.org sounds intriguing to me.
By the way, I found “Dr. Laura Paajanen” as a researcher in Helsinki who specialized in milk. You can also make “laurapaajanenintheworld.org”!
http://milk.procon.org/viewsource.asp?ID=3169
Bonita Huffman Said,
November 12, 2008 @ 3:01 pm
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