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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

Who gives their real DOB when registering for a website? I've been using January 1st, 1975 as my birthday ever since I started using the internet.

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Right. We're talking about a social network here, where other people are interacting with you based on the data you entered. Sure, you can fake your birthday (and interests, gender etc..), but if you do this you're either not grasping the idea of these social networks or you're creating one of these 'I'm just in to snoop on people I know' account.

So I certainly think it makes sense to give out real data, iff you plan to use the service as intended.

That said, the bigger problem is that Google happily accepted his date of birth in Google+, added it to the Google account and afterwards locked him out of every Google service. That's crap. And it just proves once more how Google aggregates all the data about you. If I fill in an innocent field on a 'fun' service, should it really have consequences for (or even be connected to) my main online identity?

I can't speak on how social media is supposed to be used (since I don't even have a facebook account), but wouldn't the kid mostly be in contact with people who know him or her outside of the computer (such as friends and family), making the "displayed age" (you can turn the display off, right?) useless? Faking a birthday seems pretty harmless and I don't see how it would hinder your experience on anything unless you enter the wrong age that gets you banned like this instance. When I was in my early teens I role played on a game and met a lot of people there I'm still in contact with, I interacted with 20+ year olds when I was 13 and there were a few younger people too.

Of course, I didn't fake my interests/gender/etc. but I've never been in the habit of storing age/location info with a private service; it's available publicly anyway, but you have to use inductive reasoning to link the data. If you want people to know your birthday, I don't see why you can't just tell them in person or email or whatever and leave the "official" fake birthday what it is.

I don't know about you, but the only way I know anyone's birthday outside of my immediate family and girlfriend is via Facebook.

This could be fixed by using the correct date but putting an earlier year.

My Facebook "friends" don't need to know my birthday if I haven't told them. And I don't give a rat's ass about them wishing me happy birthday on there either.

> That said, the bigger problem is that Google happily accepted his date of birth in Google+, added it to the Google account and afterwards locked him out of every Google service.

Well said, I think the most worrying part is that google didn't even warn us it was going to use this information across all its services, this is the first time I'm actually disappointed by google.

Now if you can just tell me the name of your first pet, we're good to go...

    I've been using January 1st, 1975 as my birthday ever 
    since I started using the internet

Oh, lots of times I use the current year just for fun.

Do not ever do this with outlook.com. A college I do work for setup student e-mail through outlook.com (the edu services were pretty good). One of the students put the current year her birthday. The admin account for the domain then became her "parent" and had to approve all e-mails. To fix this requires calling customer support and getting bitched out by someone from another country (I am not kidding). It was very frustrating.

Some marketing site, somewhere, is trying to sell to the wrong age group because of this :)

I press page down a few times when I tab to the year field myself!

No worries, I'm blocking all the ads too, so it makes no difference ;)

I like to use start of epoch - 1970-01-01

Great idea!

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