Back in mid 2004, I got a beta invite to Gmail from a friend of mine (Google famously launched Gmail on April 1, but it wasn’t one of their notorious April Fool’s Day jokes, just bad timing for a launch). When I got access to it, I set my email as something simple - adamvarn at gmail.com.
I’ve used other emails since then, but have (probably far too many) accounts tied to that email address so I still actively use it, check it, etc. As Gmail grew in popularity and is now basically ubiquitous for so many people, being an early adopter and having such a straight forward email has always been a nice little perk.
Starting in about 2022 or so, I started getting emails - real emails, not spam - for things that were legit but weren’t relevant to me. Emails such as a reminder that my Honda is due for service (I don’t drive a Honda) at a dealership, form response letters from Senators and Congress people about issues (things I never submitted), etc.
Interestingly, all of these emails were sent to adam.varn and not adamvarn. Google clearly states that the dot in an email address is basically ignored, which is why adam.varn and adamvarn go to the same place.
But let’s back up for a second. Adam isn’t my actual first name (it’s my middle name), it is just the one that I go by, since my parents apparently decided that having to correct teachers, employers and other official documentation on my full actual name was a worthwhile quest to endure.
So that means that the adam.varn emails were being sent to someone whose first name IS Adam. Ok, so no big deal right? Lots of people have the same name out there, and though Varn isn’t that unheard of or unique of a last name (not common by any stretch but there are literally dozens of us. Dozens!) it is mildly interesting to me that the name I go by and is my middle name, is the same name someone goes by for their first name, and that we share the same last name.
I live in Florida (life long Florida Man!) That Honda dealership I mentioned though? It’s in South Carolina. Those Senators/Congress people? Also the South Carolina reps for the Palmetto State. And I know that I DO have distant relatives that live there (there is even a Varnsville, population 1,669 in South Carolina) and I would assume that Varn is a fairly common last name there, at least more so than here in the “Free State of Florida”.
But here’s where the modern internet, identity theft and data collection these days, gets a bit creepy. It’s one thing to get spam and automated emails meant for someone else. But I’ve also gotten Nextdoor invites for “Adam Varn” in not just the city but the neighborhood that they live in (and based on some Google searching, “Adam Varn” is doing quite well for himself!), as well as invitations for running clubs/5ks that he has participated in, and other miscellany that basically helped me piece together a picture of “Adam Varn” and the life that they live.
Once I had a ballpark idea of where “Adam Varn” lives, a quick search on Facebook found his profile (I deleted my own 2 years ago), with a picture of him and his kids and wife. We’re only about 2 years apart in age, and though we don’t look that much alike, we are white dudes with beards in their 40s with a shared name, so a stranger would not know the difference.
But here’s where things got really really weird. I got an email from the school where one of his children go, requesting a phone conversation to talk about some struggles they were having (I won’t get into details for privacy reasons but let’s just say it wasn’t for chewing gum in class). This email came from an official at the school, who likely had never meant “Adam Varn”, so it would have been so so simple for me to pretend to be him, based on the info I found about him on Facebook and other places, and be some combination of:
All of the other emails I had received, I would just chuckle and ignore. But for this last one, I emailed the person back, explained that despite the “From” saying “Adam Varn” that I was NOT him and went into the email confusion and tried to be as polite and helpful as I could. The official from the school quickly emailed me back and said they would call him directly instead.
This might have just been an amusing anecdote, but this also illustrates how much of our data leaks everywhere on the internet. We have no control anymore of our personal information, and the way that it is used. What used to be a unique online identifier (an email address) is now just one more piece of data, harvested and stored to build a picture of a person that may not be named directly in some massive database, but a blurred portrait of who they are is basically there. And that’s not even counting actual identity theft - a person close to me in my life went through that in 2024, and the total nightmare of it I wouldn’t wish that on the worst person in the world.
All it took was a mistyped email address, and suddenly I am in “Adam Varn”’s life, knowing his age, what he looks like, the car he drives, the neighborhood he lives in, where he stands politically and the school his kids go to. We may share a name, but we are total strangers, and I built this profile of him as an amateur, not some start-up whose sole purpose is to quantify us as data and then sell it for pennies.
I wish that there was some sort of resolution to this that I could get, but figure the emails are just going to keep on coming. I could try to reach out to him about everything, but really don’t know how at this point and to me that would be beyond creepy (“Hey we have the same name, and I know XYZ about you, can you please fix your email address everywhere? Thanks!").
So, Adam Varn if you are out there, please get in touch with Adam Varn. If you need his email address, you should already have it, because it’s (almost) the same as yours.