Speaking for myself, my friends and I would do this as teens in '99 with a open protocol chat program called MIRC. This was chatting with strangers, and back then everyone opened conversations by asking "ASL?" which meant "Age, Sex, Location".

We figured out pretty early on that by saying "Female", you opened yourself up to a torrent of creepy come-ons, which to us was absolutely hilarious. Here was this complete stranger who did not have so much as a profile picture to go off of, either professing his undying love to you after a few messsages, or straight up using abusive and degrading language.

As an old millenial now, it's been pretty shocking to me how open Gen Z is about revealing numerous identifying details about themselves on social networks. I'm under 40 and we were raised to protect our privacy online, and this was when surveillance tech was in the stone ages.