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Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

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Re: Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

#11

Post by xeromal »

globular-toast wrote: post #7
alpaca128 wrote: post #2

> Obviously this is my mistake No, it isn't. 2022 should not be a valid date of birth in the first place. And the account being locked because of that should probably also not happen without additional checks. It's okay to have standards even when most UIs are bad.

What should be the lowest valid date of birth? Is there some universal standard? I know it feels like 4 months is quite young, but where would you draw the line?

At least in the US, I don't believe you're supposed to use the internet unless you're 13 or older. You could start there for your dropdown.

Re: Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

#12

Post by dragonwriter »

tpxl wrote: post #4

This is how I got locked out of my 10 year old skype account (good riddance). The support _cannot_ do anything due to some silly child protection laws (coppa maybe?).

The age verification feature is for COPPA compliance, but I’d really like to see the provision that prevents correcting errors.

Re: Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

#14

Post by varenc »

I've been seeing age checks like this more and more.

Recently the FTC came down hard[0] on Kurbo (aka Weight Watchers) for not doing enough/anything to stop children under 13 (COPPA) from making accounts. Since they're not confident there's no children with accounts, now all Kurbo's data is tainted and they have to delete all user data and destroy any "algorithms" derived from that data.

Historically Dropbox probably never asked for a user's age so they might worry they could run into this problem in the future. The threat of all a company's data being tainted is a huge one, so of course they're now overreacting a bit.

p.s. hopefully you can get your account fixed, but if not, you could use the amazing rclone[1] tool to copy your files off. (it's rsync for cloud storage). Or you could just put them in a folder shared with another DBX account.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...

[1] https://rclone.org/

Re: Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

#15

Post by tpxl »

dragonwriter wrote: post #12
tpxl wrote: post #4

This is how I got locked out of my 10 year old skype account (good riddance). The support _cannot_ do anything due to some silly child protection laws (coppa maybe?).

The age verification feature is for COPPA compliance, but I’d really like to see the provision that prevents correcting errors.

They will correct errors, after you give them a bunch of document scans or a credit card. I wasn't willing to provide that to a random foreign company for a free service, I just moved to Discord.

Re: Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

#16

Post by mindslight »

xeromal wrote: post #11
globular-toast wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should be the lowest valid date of birth? Is there some universal standard? I know it feels like 4 months is quite young, but where would you draw the line?

At least in the US, I don't believe you're supposed to use the internet unless you're 13 or older. You could start there for your dropdown.

Er, no. There is an actual privacy law with teeth if you're under 13 ("COPPA"). Companies don't want to be subject to any such regulation, so they choose to prohibit anyone under 13 from using their services. It's widely assumed that people under 13 simply work around these prohibitions by lying about their age, but as long as the companies don't have specific knowledge of this then legally everything is fine. Making the dropdown preclude ages under 13 could be interpreted as companies encouraging this behavior, and is thus a non-starter compliance wise.

Re: Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

#17

Post by xjay »

alpaca128 wrote: post #2

> Obviously this is my mistake No, it isn't. 2022 should not be a valid date of birth in the first place. And the account being locked because of that should probably also not happen without additional checks. It's okay to have standards even when most UIs are bad.

Coder sees "We need feature X". Coder implements feature X, marks it as complete; next.

So they have the coder (implementer) role covered, but not the "programmer" role ("thinker"/feature designer).

Leslie Lamport - Thinking Above the Code: ~ A lot of people like to think that they're thinking, but they don't really do much thinking. [1]

Evidently, there was no expectation that the coder/implementer was supposed to do any thinking here.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Yp3j_jk8Q&t=134s

Re: Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

#18

Post by armchairhacker »

varenc wrote: post #14

I've been seeing age checks like this more and more. Recently the FTC came down hard[0] on Kurbo (aka Weight Watchers) for not doing enough/anything to stop children under 13 (COPPA) from making accounts. Since they're not confident there's no children with accounts, now all Kurbo's data is tainted and they have to delete all user data and destroy any "algorithms" derived from that data. Historically Dropbox probably…

Kurbo is really controversial though. It’s a health tracker specifically for kids, as young as 8, which focuses on calories and weight more than nutrition. And it tracks everyone’s data, so because of technicalities if the child is under 13 the parents have to sign them up (still tracks their data).

Re: Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

#19

Post by exfascist »

For those of you in need of an immediate drop-in replacement that won't tie you to an organization which will do the same thing a decade from now: Syncthing[1] is awesome. It's all FOSS, peer to peer, you're limited by your own hardware and network, and it uses PKI instead of some central auth service. The only reason I don't use it anymore is because I've switched to git for all my textfiles and rsync (lol I know) for archiving binaries, that won't work for people who use a lot of GUI tools though so I'd recommend you use Syncthing.

[1] https://syncthing.net/

Re: Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account

#20

Post by exfascist »

xeromal wrote: post #11
globular-toast wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should be the lowest valid date of birth? Is there some universal standard? I know it feels like 4 months is quite young, but where would you draw the line?

At least in the US, I don't believe you're supposed to use the internet unless you're 13 or older. You could start there for your dropdown.

You're definitely allowed to use the internet but there are very strict rules on data collection. I think the intent is to keep people under 13 from using the internet socially or being exposed to the data collection/PR/ad machines.
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