Facebook Apparently Doesn't Believe Anyone Over 100 Could Use The Service, 104 Year Old Has To Lie
from the for-the-encouragement-of-lying dept
There are plenty of stories about children under the age of 13 having to lie (often with the assistance of their parents) to get on Facebook. This is due to the ridiculous COPPA law that the FTC supports strongly, despite it doing close to nothing to actually "protect children." But what's the excuse for people lying at the other end of the scale? A 104 years old woman is forced to be perpetually 99 years old because Facebook apparently refuses ages higher than that. It makes you wonder if they just never thought someone with three digits in their age would use the service and only set up the database to handle two digits. Oddly, rather than defaulting down to 99 years old when Marguerite Joseph tried to enter her birth year of 1908, the system automatically took 20 years off her life and said she was born in 1928. Either way, just as parents are helping children lie about their age at the youth end of the spectrum, in this case, it's Marguerite's granddaughter who's the accomplice here, since Marguerite is legally blind, but still likes to keep in touch with people via Facebook.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: age, coppa, services, social networks
Companies: facebook
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Run for the Hills!
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That is unlikely. They are not going to store the user's age since that changes, but her birthdate. It's much more likely they decided as an error-checking measure that any age over 99 must be a mistake. It's bad design rather than bad coding. That distinction may seem like splitting hairs but not to a programmer. :-)
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You are not splitting hairs on this one.
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The design that says "any age over 99 is an error condition".
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This is more important than Facebook dodging taxes?
Take a loopy tour of Techdirt.com! You always end up at same place!
http://techdirt.com/
Mike claims to have a college degree in economics, don't ya know?
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Re: This is more important than Facebook dodging taxes?
As apposed to you and joe? Who have degrees in nothing?
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Re: This is more important than Facebook dodging taxes?
Hey, ootb, where's your blog where you're reporting this story? I'd like to read your quality journalism since Mike isn't writing it yet?
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Re: This is more important than Facebook dodging taxes?
Maybe you should try economicdirt.com.
This is "TechDirt" which focuses on technology and how that impacts people. Sure, sometimes technology does have an economic impact, but not always.
Facebook uses a technology, and in this case the impact to the economy is non-existent, so why would this article focus on economics?
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Re: This is more important than Facebook dodging taxes?
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Re: This is more important than Facebook dodging taxes?
I see they are still experimenting with your dosage levels, good luck.
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Re: This is more important than Facebook dodging taxes?
I've never seen you post anything in your own field either. Unless your own field is being a complete and thorough jackass.
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Re: Re: This is more important than Facebook dodging taxes?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/18/facebook-doesnt-pay-taxes-on-its-pr ofits-so-what/
I'm not sure why he demands that Mike debunk it for him since it's already been debunked elsewhere, but I assume the facts have been filtered out with whatever system he's using that filters out his civility, sanity and common sense.
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For the children
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Just wait
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Why give Facebook your real age anyway?
This article says "has to lie." How about, "wants to lie"?
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Re: Why give Facebook your real age anyway?
Here’s what Facebook Graph Search is doing next | VentureBeat: "Once Facebook dumps all the Open Graph data into the mix — way beyond what pages you like, including what you bought, sites you’ve commented on, your online game scores, etc. — the computations get even more complex, the filters for relevance even more clever."
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I and others will rue the day...
Rather than figure out a fix for it, they will probably decide you are a liar/scam artist/flim flammer/etc, and shut down both your accounts (locking up any money you had in your PayPal account, and your online identity with Facebook) with no recourse, until you can prove you were born in 1908 and 1928.
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Re: I and others will rue the day...
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Unless one of them is PayPal or the like...
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If the PayPal user is linking to a legitimate bank or credit card and there have been no problems and the user has been using PayPal, I doubt that PayPal is going to delete the user. (eBay has had some sketchy people/companies selling stuff there, so I don't think eBay goes out of its way to delete people.)
Now, a company like Facebook could start deleting people if their birthdates don't match up, but I suspect that those who get deleted will figure it is time to take a break from Facebook anyway.
These companies don't want to delete people unless there's a real problem for the companies. I doubt that providing an incorrect birth date (unless you are a minor) is actually much of a problem for Facebook. Of course, they want as much accurate info as possible to sell your data, but that's precisely why people don't always provide it. Facebook is going to have to figure out that privacy balance.
Most websites (unless they are liquor sites) don't require you to provide birth dates.
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Re: I and others will rue the day...
For example, Forrest Hill, Forrest Small, Forrest Strong are all variations on one name. Can you guess it?
Or you could just use another language variation on a name, such as John, Ian, Iain, Sean, Shawn, Jan, Yani, Jack.
How on earth and why on earth would they then make the assumption that any two names belong to the same person. if you do a web search for me, there are at least six of us to be found around the world, funnily enough, a number of those are in the same field of endeavour.
Unless there is other information such as addresses or bank accounts or other identifiers used, you cannot make an assumption programmatically that two individuals are in fact the same person.
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Re: Re: I and others will rue the day...
Nobody said they'd be comparing names. Matching email address could be enough information for a business to make a stupid decision.
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I assume that many of these tracking companies do, in fact, know who they are following and can figure out one person from another. But again, I don't think they are actually going to be blocking people who don't give them the correct birth date unless there is a very specific reason to supply it. And if they do start blocking people because people try to hide personal info about themselves from companies like Facebook, then the privacy wars are going to get kicked up a notch or two.
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