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A very, very happy birthday to Colin!
On the subject of birthdays, the recent proposed profile page redesign/Vox/LJ-is-for-teenagers kerfuffle has quite reasonably resulted in LJ wanting a better idea of what the actual age distribution of its users is.
The problem is, there's no way to tell them without either telling the universe exactly what one's birthday is, or telling no one at all. LJ has some very handy little ways of letting its users know what birthdays are forthcoming among those on a friendslist, but this only works when the date is shared. There's no way to share just the date and not the year, so many only list the date - leaving LJ with no idea how old their average user actually is. I have no real objections to people I know and trust knowing this sort of information about me. I do object to random online people knowing so easily - it's just one more piece of data which risks identity fraud, and there's no point compounding the problem when so much is already available so freely online. I'm feeling indecisive as to what to do about this right now - up the average LJ age, or keep what birthday information I have here publically available.
On the subject of birthdays, the recent proposed profile page redesign/Vox/LJ-is-for-teenagers kerfuffle has quite reasonably resulted in LJ wanting a better idea of what the actual age distribution of its users is.
The problem is, there's no way to tell them without either telling the universe exactly what one's birthday is, or telling no one at all. LJ has some very handy little ways of letting its users know what birthdays are forthcoming among those on a friendslist, but this only works when the date is shared. There's no way to share just the date and not the year, so many only list the date - leaving LJ with no idea how old their average user actually is. I have no real objections to people I know and trust knowing this sort of information about me. I do object to random online people knowing so easily - it's just one more piece of data which risks identity fraud, and there's no point compounding the problem when so much is already available so freely online. I'm feeling indecisive as to what to do about this right now - up the average LJ age, or keep what birthday information I have here publically available.
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"Age Verification
Please select the month, day, and year you were born. We require this information to create an account in order to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This information is not stored in our database and is only used during account creation."
Seems to me that they could just store the year in a separate database table away from other account information - or even subtract birthdate from registration date and store anonymous ages that could be automatically updated in a table separate from account info. This would introduce some false dates when journals expire or undergo deletion, but it would still be as or more accurate than asking users to voluntarily expose their birthdates on a profile page (as somewhere between 0% and 100% of users would comply).
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This is also mentioned in the news post you linked to!
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What would be nice would be if the LJ maintainers could poll us, or something, to find out the average age. *shrugs* Or it seems like they could set something up so that everyone would have to log in once even if they usually don't, and then have to give age in order to do so. If they really wanted to know.
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I did apply for a free gift from one company, and evidently they shared their application database w/ Globe Insurance company, because for a few years I kept getting retirement/senior citizen/long term care insurance offers from Globe.
My SSN was one of those recently stolen in the massive veteran database. That coupled with my birthday is a powerful combination for identity theft, so I don't advertise it all that much.
birthdays in blogs
Cie
http://withersea.blogspot.com
Re: birthdays in blogs
Funny about Blogger's horoscopic interest.