Birth date data

[Wazoo]

Received via PM;

Suggest that month and day of birth not be available entry options in the user profile if they are publicly viewable due to identity theft concerns. No need to respond. Thanks.

[jongrose]

Is the availability of DOB data really significant info for identify thieves? How so? And, if so, there are a lot of forums out there allowing people to post their DOB publicly as well as publicly available birthday databases with this type of info.

[Wazoo]

The PM was received by one of those folks that managed to Register here using his e-mail address as a 'display name' .... a whole different issue ...

In the case of 'this Forum' ... not really a lot of time spent worrying about it, actually. It would take a whole lot more work to take a user's chosen 'display name' here, marry that up with a birthdate (if it was entered) and turning that into someone's actual identity ....

The typical 'use' of a birthdate would be for the use of a COPPA set-up, which I eventually truned off. The instructions were for a parent/guardian to FAX or snail-mail the authorization for a minor to get into the middle of all this .... absurd in my opinion, as who's to say that the child involved printed up and signed his/her own authorization to begin with? Yeah, maybe something for the legal aspects, but in reality ....????

(The real work has been to try to keep this as close to a PG-13 <or less> area for the most part, admitting that some of the spam spew does make that hard at times ...)

This Forum application does in fact have a setting to 'announce' people's birthdays as a part of the 'status' block. This is also turned off. Some older folks object to people knowing their age ... some folks get ticked off when they get a response (no matter how appropriate) from a 12-year-old ....

Anyway, seen as not-applicable for the most part within the confines of 'this' Forum ....