HACKER Q&A
📣 everybodyknows

Has Google figured out you gave them a fake date of birth?


Way back when, as a privacy preservation measure, I set up the account with an off-by-one birth date. Today, on attempting to log in to Gmail, I was blocked at a screen claiming

  Your date of birth is missing.  This information is needed to comply with the law.
I figure this happened because Google learned the true date, by other means.

Anyone else seeing this?

  👤 jqpabc123 Accepted Answer ✓
Never give anyone your real DOB without a proven need to know.

The key to using a fake DOB is consistency. Use some simple formula to be able to reproduce your fake DOB on demand. If you can't do this, if you use different DOBs, Google will obviously know your date is fake.

As an example, here is what I do to create a consistent DOB for my fake online persona.

Swap month and day (instead of May 10th, I use Oct. 5th) then reverse the last 2 digits of year. My formula obviously won't work for you if the resulting date is invalid so develop your own. For example, you could subtract X from year, month and day. Or use your mother/wife's month and day with your year. Anything will work as long as you can remember and reproduce it.

My online persona also uses a different spelling variation of my name.

Once again, consistency is the key to not eventually being rejected or banned.

👤 sunsipples
as a tech savvy 93/98/109/138 year old man/woman/undisclosed in this security focused world we live in, I have yet to be quizzed by any provider of online services to verify my A/S/L other than that one time your mother was in IRC
👤 csunbird
What law requires Google/an email company to know your exact DoB?
👤 Tepix
Every UNIX affinado ought to use 1970-01-01 as the DOB (the start of epoch).
👤 rzzzwilson
I got it as well. Can't remember if I ever gave Google any birthdate but, no matter, another fake birthdate works fine.
👤 stevage
I have seen that message on one of my Gmail accounts, but it didn't actually block me I think.
👤 pestatije
What about your name? Have they figured out you gave them a fake name?