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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

#91

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

sushid wrote: post #40
mindslight wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you! Thank god there's someone who knows why features like this are being implemented. You can't just say you're compliant by adding a button that says "I'm above the age of 13." Dropbox has to include ages younger than 13 in their dropdown selection.

Funny, the law about alcohol and tobacco related websites must not have the same “teeth”, to use grandparent’s wording. In those websites, a simple modal that says “Yes I am over 18” (tobacco) / “Yes, I am over 21” (alcohol) or “No I’m not” is what everyone uses.

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

#92

Post by hansvm »

cdjk wrote: post #77
willcipriano wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This got past the undoubtedly upwards of nine product managers/business analysts/directors/etc on the team as well. Blaming the low man on that totem pole in a organization thick with management like that is silly. None of the "idea men" had the idea of "what if someone's cat walks across the keyboard when we ask them their birthday". That's the embarrassing failure here.

This could actually be a feature and not a bug from a legal perspective. If they are blocking anyone who gives any indication that they are under 13 then it might be easier to show compliance with COPPA. This has made me wonder at times if the best way to get my data delete from someplace is to talk to customer service and repeatedly say that I'm twelve.

That's definitely how it explicitly worked at one workplace; to the extent that account restrictions could form a poset, if we had evidence that some restriction might be required (e.g., from multiple forms of age evidence, do any of them indicate this might be a minor or some other protected class), that restriction would be applied.

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

#93

Post by gitrog »

pjbeam wrote: post #90

Hi OP, if you want drop an email to my HN handle at protonmail dot com. I can't promise magic but can speak with a person at work tomorrow to try to get this resolved for you.

Hi, thanks for the offer, I caved and provided Dropbox support with a copy of my passport and that seemed to be enough to resolve the issue (I hope, I really really hope).

If you work at Dropbox I think it could still be useful to raise some of the concerns mentioned here with whoever is the product owner of this feature.

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

#94

Post by em-bee »

jrockway wrote: post #80
em-bee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder though if doing that doesn't risk detection since it's pretty obviously false.

I am not sure if I care about detection. They will obviously shut down your account if you're too young, but they don't have any legal demand to shut down your account if you're too old, so they probably won't bother. Most of the places where I see these things are not services like Dropbox where I'm a customer, but for things like alcohol marketing websites. "To view our collection, you must be over 21. Type your ag…

well, they could shut it down for being an obviously fake account.

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

#95

Post by savanaly »

gitrog wrote: post #71
taylorhughes wrote: post #60

Note that this is due to legal requirements around discovering a user's age in a "neutral" way, in order to block under-13 users (or varying other ages depending on global jurisdiction). This is called a "neutral age screen". The screen cannot indicate that there will be a lockout, or underage users would just say they were older to get around it. It sucks, but most apps of a certain size and liability profile have t…

Does the law also state that you can't fix the date afterwards, or that once entered verification is required? It's a paid account, they've already got my credit card details. And how does it make sense that I was born 2 weeks ago? I don't know, I felt really stupid when I entered the wrong year but since then I've grown increasingly frustrated by how poorly this feature has been implemented.

Wouldn't it kind of defeat the purpose if you could simply change the age after?

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

#96

Post by rsync »

kingcharles wrote: post #53
encryptluks2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note depending on the amount of storage, rsync.net is substantially more expensive. For $100 a year you can get 2TB of storage with Google Drive, which works flawlessly with rclone. Additionally, for roughly $80 you can get 15+months of Office 365 Family which provides 1TB of storage each for up to 6 users which also works with rclone and restic. For the same storage with rsync.net you could be looking at $500.00/mon…

Yowch. I didn't realize the price difference was so substantial. I have GDrive and OneDrive accounts too. OneDrive's Windows integration works great. I'm just trying to get away from Google and Microsoft tie-downs because I don't trust their ability to give me support if I got locked out of my account for some reason.

A reminder that there is a "HN Readers" discount - just email info@rsync.net and ask about it.

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

#97

Post by vanous »

kissgyorgy wrote: post #24

I found a Dropbox alternative: https://nextcloud.com/ I'm never going back. Way better in every aspect than Dropbox.

Fully agree! I self host and my family uses it. For them, there's no difference, except that when at home (99% of time), "our cloud" (Nextcloud) is much faster.

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

#98

Post by vanous »

spicybright wrote: post #52
marcosdumay wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are stuff like NextCloud now, that you can run by yourself. Rsync + a bash script is horrible to get going in a mobile device. (What is the fault of the mobile OSes, and if you can get by with a less hostile one, great for you.) Those open-core ones put some work on it.

I use syncthing to sync my entire phone. Now I have a 64GB folder on my desktop that /is/ my phone, but all normal local files I can treat like any other file. Taking a picture with my phone and having it show up on my computer in 5 seconds is pretty close to magic in terms of file sharing. Completely free, andno central server to introduce "age verification" or whatever.

Syncthing user of many years and a semi recent Nextcloud convert here.

Sc is very, very cool but you must sync both ways every time, so after some time, if your phone runs out of space, things get hard. The "do not erase on 'server'" setting is pretty well hidden and claimed not to be supported and can break things.

Also, for "one way sync", with super easy setup, i have not found an alternative for btsync (now called resilio). SC is too clunky to set up the client and in this case, running Nextcloud server + setting up clients is crazy complex. TIL about Unison and will try it out...

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

#99

Post by pragmatic »

falcolas wrote: post #66
exfascist wrote: post #19

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) f…

One feature of Dropbox I take shameless advantage of is sharing files (not pirated material, FWIW) via a link. Suggestions on a replacement for that, since Syncthing can't do that?

This.

I found old save games still shared via Dropbox or Google docs that work 7-8 years later.

The combinations I see in other comments are not going to survive that long.

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

#100

Post by encryptluks2 »

rsync wrote: post #96
kingcharles wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yowch. I didn't realize the price difference was so substantial. I have GDrive and OneDrive accounts too. OneDrive's Windows integration works great. I'm just trying to get away from Google and Microsoft tie-downs because I don't trust their ability to give me support if I got locked out of my account for some reason.

A reminder that there is a "HN Readers" discount - just email info@rsync.net and ask about it.

How about have some transparent competitive pricing on your website?
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