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Discussion on: Changing your name is a hard unsolved problem in Computer Science

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yrrepnrek profile image
Yrrep Nrek

PayPal primarily doesn't allow handle changes to help combat fraud. Imagine creating one PayPal account and letting a bot with a name list a million handles long just cruise around. Not allowing reuse in that world would quickly destroy all sensible usernames.

Combating fraud is the primary reason most popular services make name changes difficult. Allowing aliases connected to a single point origin account like Google is the compromise.

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mwarner77 profile image
Mark Warner

The policy may have changed, but Google used to restrict name changes to once per year. I think that is a pretty reasonable strategy for dealing with this sort of thing.

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spiralx profile image
James Skinner

I agree, and in the rare case where you need to change it more than that I think having to contact them manually to get it done isn't at all unreasonable.