Faithlife profile security: Birthday
Hi.
Lately, I've been considering the safety of personal information in social networking profiles. This is one more application of my realization that, given the number of major website breakins in recent years (LinkedIn, SourceForge, Adobe, etc), it seems that one can't trust any website just because they might trust the company that owns that website
Of course we all know that we must be careful about what we post; but moreover, my new particular concern is birth-date. Faithlife and other social networks require that users supply their birthday to establish that they fulfill the requirement of being >13 yrs old, yet birth-date is also used for financial, medical, etc security purposes.
Any thoughts?
Comments
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Yes, every November I get a birthday present from Logos. My birthday is public record so I don't mind any site where I must use it.
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Pete, this probably sounds 'not good' on this forum, but I fake it without a thought.
First, it's not their business. Second, security-wise, it's the COMBINATION that is important. Shifting the birthday off by one digit is all that's really needed to discourage a match on the various customer tracking databases on the internet. But it's a means of saying 'which Matthew Hamrick' in building your profile for various unknown companies.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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Like Matt said, birthdays are public information. With a little searching you can find it for anyone anyway.
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David Taylor Jr said:
Like Matt said, birthdays are public information. With a little searching you can find it for anyone anyway.
Really, how? Even if the person doesn't use it on social network sites, etc?
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Pete De Bonte said:David Taylor Jr said:
Like Matt said, birthdays are public information. With a little searching you can find it for anyone anyway.
Really, how? Even if the person doesn't use it on social network sites, etc?
States have public databases of birth records and death records.
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To obtain a birth certificate, my birth state requires proof that the requester is at least very closely related to me, or has a court order.
If you are referring to something other than obtaining copies of birth certificates, can you be more specific? Is this information freely accessible via the web? If all of this is true, then it would clearly be out of my control and I would just have to trust God about it (and thus may as well stop worrying)
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Pete De Bonte said:
To obtain a birth certificate, my birth state requires proof that the requester is at least very closely related to me, or has a court order.
If you are referring to something other than obtaining copies of birth certificates, can you be more specific? Is this information freely accessible via the web? If all of this is true, then it would clearly be out of my control and I would just have to trust God about it (and thus may as well stop worrying)
Yes there are sites publicly available that can get that information on just about anyone. One of my jobs at work is to "skip trace" (find people), so I utilize these options all of the time. It is amazing the amount of information that is out there.
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birthdatabase.com is one site that has free birthdates, but it doesn't match all.
I have also used Ancestry.com to find birthdates for family members.
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