Sep 10, 2009

Mistaken ID

Got some mail from an airline carrier yesterday letting me know that my frequent flyer miles were going to expire soon.  This was news to me since I do not even remember applying for a FF# with that carrier, but I shrugged that off to a faulty memory (or perhaps to my parents signing me up for stuff).  Anyway, after logging onto the website, the homepage told me the FF# was registered to my sister.  I double-checked the letter, and sure enough, it was sent to my name.  After browsing through the website some more, I found that some pages listed me as the account holder, and some listed my sister…  Okay, we have (or at least we had) the same address and the same birthdate (we are twins), so I guess I can see how this might occur, but isn’t that why we use unique ID’s (or FF#’s) - so that we do not have to rely on other identifying information that may possibly be duplicated across individuals?  Besides, shouldn’t the database at least be able to recognize that it has two names tagged to the same ID, or is it just assuming there was a name change or one is an alias?  (Though one would think it might prevent two names from being tagged to the same ID, what with airline security and all.)

Not a big problem here, but like my previous post, this reminded me of past events… like the time my sister and I were coming back to the States after a summer in Taiwan, and the customs agent scanned our passports, only to have the machine respond that I had never left the country.  The agent said this was probably due to the similarity of our passports (since it also somehow said my sister had left the country twice), but come on, if I cannot even use my passport to legally distinguish between my sister and myself, what’s left?

Other notable mistaken ID instances:
* The time a receptionist at the doctor’s office asked me if I had surgery earlier in the week even though it was my sister who had visited then, and then proceded to ask me if I was sure when I said “no” - as if I would not remember having surgery.
* All the times in K-12 when my sister and I got placed in the same class and our teachers switched up our grades, and once when they would not correct it since the grades had already been submitted.
* Walking across campus (we went to the same undergrad), having some random individual wave “hi” to me, giving them a nod back (by that time, I figured if I didn’t know who they were, they probably knew my sister), then having them complain to my sister the next time she saw them about how rude she was for just giving them a head nod in greeting.

I digress from my original point on unique ID’s, and now that we are separated by some 2000 miles (she’s back in Texas), it should be harder for these kinds of things to happen, I suppose.  Still, I must have tons of accounts/IDs (schools and scholarships I have applied to, banks, driver’s license #, SSN, as well as more innocuous ones like facebook or various blogs or forums) - it is a bit funny to think that the latter (that allow anonymity) actually do a better job at keeping the accounts of my sister and myself separate.

2 Responses To This Entry:

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In this digital age, I am kind of surprised that someone could still make that sort of mistake.

Granted, you are being mistaken for your twin. But even still, it is not like you are being sorted based on your looks, but rather based on more differentiable attributes, such as name and SS number.

Posted by: nakoruru on September 15th, 2009 at 5:03 pm

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I wonder if biometric photo recognition software has problems distinguishing twins.

Posted by: Junko on September 27th, 2009 at 3:05 am

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