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Set your age to below 13 in Coinbase for a fun surprise. As soon as you click "update", you are insta-locked out of your account.
by WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
Set your age to below 13 in Coinbase for a fun surprise.
As soon as you click "update", you are insta-locked out of your account.
- bpodgursky 5y agoThe US legal code doesn't give them a ton of flexibility here. Coinbase has to push the boundaries of US legal code interpretation in plenty of other places... picking "letting pre-teens manage accounts" would be a dumb hill to die on.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoYou’d think that’d be prevented when they identity proof you with government identity credentials considering the immutability of your birth date.
- dotancohen 5y ago> the immutability of your birth date. Another falsehood programmers believe about dates. )) When immigrants move across borders, often if there is no record of date of birth the date used is the first of January on a best-guess year, and sometimes even the year is wrong. Later this information could be updated. I know of a case of a man whose birthday (immigrant from China) went from January 1st, 1900 to some date in the late 1890s upon documentation being found, just slightly before his 100th (living) birthday. There are, of course, also reasons for deliberately falsifying a birth date. Accessing an online service is one, false claim of benefits (e.g. pension) may be another, avoiding or enlisting in armed forces, purchasing age-restricted material, renting a hotel or vehicle, the list goes on. A robust system must account for these possibilities.
- ricardobayes 5y agoYes, but you are designing a system based on a once in 100,000 edge case. There is no reason why such odd and rare requests can't be handled in a customer support request.
- jimnotgym 5y ago...If your customer service team are sufficiently well staffed, trained and have escalation points. In the article the customer service team couldn't even read a decision made by 'The Back End Team'.
- hyperman1 5y agoYou're seriously underestimating gow much this happens with current rates of immigration. 1 in 1000 to 1 in 5000 seems to be the correct rate in my country. Besides, Even with 1 in 100k, with the US population of 330 million, you've created trouble for 3 300 people based on this edge case alone.
- vidarh 5y agoA more realistic case for you: People make far more mistakes than you think. Having done genealogy recently, the number of documents with people messing up their own birthdate or name is staggering. On top of the much larger number of registers where someone else have taken the information down wrong.
- evanb 5y agoOr when there's a difference in convention. For example, the European convention dd/mm/yy[yy] and the US convention mm/dd/yy[yy].
- indymike 5y ago> There is no reason why such odd and rare requests can't be handled in a customer support request. Since we're in the middle of a bad customer service with no appeal discussion... can we assume you are joking?
- 5y ago
- MandieD 5y agoModern example: my father, who is still living, driving, and traveling internationally. When he was 15, his parents decided it was time for him to start driving his mother around, who never learned how to drive. They wrote down his birth year to make him appear 16. The Texas Department of Public Safety in the 60s wasn’t quite as strict about proof of identity as it is now. Fast forward to the late 90s, and digitized driver’s licenses. Fortunately, my mother had an inkling that life for my dad might get a bit complicated with a driver's license that didn’t match his birth certificate, so she pushed him to get it corrected. I imagine there are at least several thousand US citizens who have never lived elsewhere whose primary ID (driver’s license) shows a different birth year from the one on their birth certificates for similar reasons, and it’s a toss-up on which date they use for various purposes.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoNot immutable for all. There are people who escaped war zones with no papers behin Syrians in Germany, Bosnians in Arizona and many other such examples in the UK. They often provide 1.1.year as dob.
- stevesimmons 5y agoMy grandmother "altered" her date of birth on her birth certificate so her husband wouldn't know she was older than he was. That date ended up on their marriage certificate. And then, after her husband passed away and she was approaching pension age, she realised she would only be eligible for the pension a few years later... So DOB is not immutable. (and another common source of DOB errors, mixing up the US MM-DD-YYYY versus the normal DD-MM-YYYY format used almost everywhere else...)
- wraptile 5y agoAs a dev I love seeing these. Makes me feel better about myself when these companies with seemingly infinite resources suck at engineering as much as I do
- saagarjha 5y agoThis seems like a policy, rather than engineering, decision.
- netcan 5y agoThis is the kind of statement that leads to this kind of a feature.
- saagarjha 5y agoIt's a policy decision regardless of whether you believe engineering should be making policy decisions (which they generally should, but I digress).
- netcan 5y agoTechnically/semantically correct. OTOH, this mentality reliably leads to these kinds of features, bugs, policies or whatever you like to call them. The software works perfectly. It's the spec that's broken. I'm going home.
- pmontra 5y agoYup, but when the age has been (let's say) 23 for an year and becomes 13, the software should smell a mistake. Of course I have no idea about the actual UI. It's a bad idea to ask for the age because it doesn't update after the birthday. A birth date is much better but it's also personal data and maybe not necessary. If all a site wants to know is if you're 18, just ask it and store a boolean. If you suddenly declare that you're not >= 18 anymore, especially after using the site for a while, smell a misclick on a checkbox, ask for confirmation and explain what's going to happen.
- bserge 5y agoTbf, I wouldn't want to deal with someone who can reverse age like that, either.
- yborg 5y agoTwitter does this as well.
- johnisgood 5y agoQuite common. On Discord, there are NSFW channels and before joining them, you have to provide your birth date (only once). If you set it to below 13, your account gets suspended/locked immediately.