Why do you need to know my last name?

Some (annoying) websites and/or mobile apps will refuse to let you proceed past their registration / login screen unless you provide a last name. Isn’t my first name enough¹?

There are a couple of ways to work around this:

• Provide a fake last name
• Provide a gibberish last name (aklsjslkja)
• Provide only the first or second letter of your real last name (e.g. “Thiago P”)
• Provide some non-latin-alphabetic character (e.g. “1”, “.”, “Э̇”)

Recently it occurred to me there’s an even cleverer idea: provide an empty (whitespace) character.

Some services have validation in place to prevent you from inserting a mere ASCII whitespace (’ ‘).

However, most will not bother to check “invisible” unicode whitespace:

‎

There’s a single whitespace character above you can easily copy. vim displays it as <200e>.

Reference: https://emptycharacter.com/