For some brief context when I (29M) was 18 I changed my name because my parents named me something really stupid. Not going to disclose what it was for obvious reasons but it had the capability of being interpreted as something offensive and it got me in a lot of trouble growing up, so I changed it. I recently told my 13 year old nephew that I changed my name (I didn’t tell him what my old name was for personal reasons) and when he was visiting me he seemed really insistent on going on my computer and I assumed it was to play roblox or something but then I found he was *searching through the statistics of the most popular names during my birth year* to try and find what my name was. I saw him doing this and said "look, what you are doing is creep behaviour, when people don’t tell you things, this is for a reason, it’s not an invitation to find other people’s personal information on the internet for fun" and I got quite cross. He started crying and now my sister and my brother in law are mad at me for making him cry.
I dont think you’re TA, but definitely cut the kid some slack, he’s 13. When I was 13 I had the emotional intelligence of a peanut
Kinda think YTA. You’re entitled to your privacy, and your NTA enforcing a boundary, but from that you said that could have been handled totally differently and avoided conflict.
Based on the context you gave, you didn’t seem to explain to a 13year old why you didn’t want him to look it up. Once you caught him that could have been a normal convo about respecting people’s privacy. People are naturally curious, I would be too. I also don’t think googling popular names is looking up your “personal information”. 13 year olds are immature, you’re an adult and called a kid a creep.
How dumb do you have to be to tell a 13 year old “I had a different name but I won’t tell you want it is.”
I’m also confused why a 13 year old needs *your* computer to do a google search.
Real or fake, YTA
YTA
The most popular names list in a given year isn’t private or personal information.
If he was digging through your bank statements or medical files, sure, read the kid the riot act, but googling common names is a pretty mild thing to start name calling over.
You gave a 13 year old a mystery and you’re pissed that they tried to solve it? Really?
YTA.
YTA. Don’t be cryptic with young kids who are naturally curious. You make it sound like they were doing some deep scan of your computer to find old traces of your name. Instead they were actually being clever and trying to use resources and context clues to see what they could figure out.
YTA
All he did was GOOGLE popular names in your birth year and you think that’s “creepy”??….. I mean honestly, what’d you expect?? A immature 13 year old is gonna get info like that and NOT be curious??
To be clear, he literally just googled “most popular names in x year?” If so then yes YTA for overblowing this. If he was looking through personal documents and filed that’s one thing, but the way you presented it he just has an idle curiosity to something a person naturally would be curious about and he took a step that was completely unoffensive and also unlikely to produce any answer of value.
As you presented it you seem offended that someone is curious about something completely normal to be curious about. If you did not want him to be interested, why did you even tell him in the first place? That’s on you.
Right, there’s no way this kid even got close with this strat? If they were named the most common thing I doubt they would have needed to change it because “they were getting in trouble”.
I think there was a way of broaching this without flying off the handle, what an overreaction. (And OP if you think you wouldn’t have tried to do the same given such a tantalising mystery, you’re lying lol)
Honestly I think this kid’s poor detective skills are the most offensive thing about all of this. I would have been like, “step aside, kid, let your Aunt Rombies show you how to properly dig up public info about people online.”
YTA, what was your need to tell him you changed your name at the first place if you didn’t wanted him to know your old name
Anyone would get curious to know the old name if you are going to talk about it
What was creep in searching names on Google ,had he been breaching your privacy that would had been understandable but here he wasn’t creep.
I get that you might feel annoyed, but in no way was nephew being creepy. He was just being nosey. You dangled a big mystery in front of a teenage boy, obviously he’s going yo be curious? You could have explained to him that he needs to respect people’s boundaries instead of treating him like some sort of unsavoury character.
It’s not like he went through your personal files, just a google search. Surely your sister knows your previous name so he could just ask his mum. What a weird post
YTA. There’s absolutely **nothing** creepy about googling common names in a given year. That’s just ordinarily curiosity. It didn’t in any way violate the boundary you set by refusing to disclose your old name.
Otoh, it’s assholish and arguably abusive to call a little kid a creep and berate him until he cries just for googling something innocuous (or really for any reason).