Namesake

A namesake is somebody or something sharing your name whose evidence bleeds into your AI resume, producing one confident profile assembled from two unrelated lives.

Plain English, used here as the name of a specific failure mode.

The equivalent technical term is an entity resolution collision.

A namesake is another entity with your name. A brand confusion is another entity in your market.

For businesses the collision is usually trading names. For people it is other humans, and the machine has no way to tell which career belongs to whom until the attributes separate them.

The book's rule is that machines separate by attributes, so you make yours loud: location, role, organisation, dates, anything that pins the record to you rather than the other person. It also covers the version nobody expects, where the namesake is your own past self.

Read about the book's argument.