We are developing a Public Display Activity Feed for our system and have encountered some privacy concerns. To resolve this, we want to truncate people's names by **First Name, Last Initial** however it's difficult to discern how to do so. Due to the variations of names, we only have one Name field on sign up, and not First and Last Name fields.

Question: 
How to Truncate names respectfully?

Considerations:

* User last names may have spaces in them (example: Someone Van Something)
* We do not have eastern users of the product so First and Last names are not in reverse order.
* We do not have an alternate "username" in our system. Most use their real names.
* Our system captures names in a single field to accommodate for different conditions such as titles and doctorates. For example: "Sir John A MacDonald PhD". This makes it difficult to create universal parsing rules.