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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

> If we wanted to hammer out a quick and effective privacy legislation, it would be: you need a demonstrable reason to ask for someone's birthday

Not much help for the American cousins, but this already exists throughout Europe and has done for years .... its called GDPR.

TL;DR : If it is or it is tied to PII (personally identifiable information) you have to:

     (a) Justify collecting it in the first place
     (b) Justify storing it, and storing it no longer than necessary
     (c) Obey with the "right to be forgotten" and delete it on request

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The GDPR has a massive enforcement problem though, so in practice, you have little recourse if a company breaches it and misuses your personal information.

Oh, here it's easy enough, you can report misuse or breach of the related Polish RODO to the Office of Personal Data Protection.

They even at times busted telemarketers using databases, much less something grave like this.

Of course you better have a good description and consider that bureaucracy moves at the speed of bureaucracy, somewhere between a snail and a plant.

You can report it sure, but does anyone actually follow up on those reports with penalties high enough to deter such behavior? At least in the UK, the answer is definitely no. Our DPA is absolutely useless and may as well not exist.

You somehow forgot to mention that most (probably all) EU countries have laws that require you to know the birthdays of your customers - that of course overrides GDPR, or more precisely, the law is the reason to store the information so there's no need to find other reasons.

Also, don't forget that these laws also have requirements on you keeping logs, most of the time 3, 5 or more years. So yeah you have to obey a deletion request when that time is up, not "on request" - that would be illegal in most cases.

In many EU countries birthdate (and more) is public information, btw - my own birthdate is made public by the state itself (on the business registry website), together with my name and residence address. Same for any owner of real estate - be it land, house or unit - names, residence addresses and birthdates are publicly available in the online cadastre.

> You somehow forgot to mention that most (probably all) EU countries have laws that require you to know the birthdays of your customers

That is simply not true, not in this very general formulation. What businesses does this statement of yours apply to?

It's certainly not common for an ecommerce site to ask for your birthday on signup.

Any online service thanks to DSA, for example: Anything that children might use (yes, so everything - intent doesn't count). Anything where users can upload content (writing comments is enough according to our lawyer).

You picked about the only remaining thing where it's not always a requirement. It's a requirement even there if the transaction is over certain threshold (varies by local law, usually around 10k EUR) or certain categories of items (drugs, alcohol, tobacco-related, sextoys, weapons etc).

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