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General discussion (archive)What the heck is wrong with “Are you 18?”(41 posts)(41 posts)
(41 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted March 01, 2014
I remember hearing a story that valve did a survey of its users based on the age input from their store and roughly 93 percent of all users were born on January 1st. Yes I was born on January 1st, 1900 thanks for asking.
Posted March 01, 2014
I just try to do it as quick as possible, thereby picking a random date every time. I think even Steam asks for this every time I logged in and try to view something age-restricted, and I claim to be born on a different date every time...
Posted March 01, 2014
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theslitherydeee: I think the main thing is that if its just a check box the person can claim that they missed the meaning or that the company made it too easy to bypass. If its an age wheel then they can say that the person intentionally lied to them since they gave false information. This puts them in the clear from lawsuits and the like.
That's probably the best line of logic for why someone might think it's a good idea, but from a legal point of view I have a hard time figuring why they still couldn't claim the user lied by deliberately checking a checkbox. It also begs the question as to why it's good enough for Terms of Service but not for a content gate? I guess when it's our ass on the line easy is fine. When it' theirs...
Posted March 01, 2014
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bevinator: I almost always put my birthdate as 1940 for these sorts of things, just to mess up any demographics they may be attempting.
I tend to use 01/01/1901...
Posted March 01, 2014
This says it all.
Posted March 01, 2014
I'm just starting to enter random dates to save time.

Before that, I always lied for privacy reasons, BUT i always wasted time entering some historically fun or meaningful reference date. Just because.

I guess that made me worse than tycho and gabe combined.
Post edited March 01, 2014 by Telika
Posted March 01, 2014
As for January first - since Sweden has a personal ten-digit identification number for every citizen (similar to USA's social security number, SSN, though I'm unsure if USA's system is mandatory, Sweden's is) - which is based on their birthdate - many immigrants (whose home culture probably didn't bother enough to record birthdates, so they only know roughly how old they are) have an official birthdate of January first (or christmas eve, lately, as January 1 was getting crowded).
Post edited March 01, 2014 by Maighstir
Posted March 01, 2014
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bevinator: I almost always put my birthdate as 1940 for these sorts of things, just to mess up any demographics they may be attempting.
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Rohan15: There are two kinds of people in this world.
Yes, there are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that know binary numbers and those who don't. :-)
Posted March 01, 2014
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donsanderson: They are getting you to physically interact with the site in a way that would be hard to automate like simply pushing a button.
This apparently is accepted as a 'digital signature' of sorts, and frees them from liability, if the content if not appropriate for some.
Yep, legal stuff. ;)
Hard to automate? It's a couple of lines of code, if that. There's plenty of web automation tools that do far, far more than this. There's one for skipping Youtube's in the Chrome store, and greasemonkey ones for skipping it on Steam.

The legal stuff never really catches on to utility, you're right, it probably just is for showing intent. I'm not sure what a court would do if someone had the automatic extensions installed.
Posted March 01, 2014
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donsanderson: They are getting you to physically interact with the site in a way that would be hard to automate like simply pushing a button.
This apparently is accepted as a 'digital signature' of sorts, and frees them from liability, if the content if not appropriate for some.
Yep, legal stuff. ;)
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sqlrob: Hard to automate? It's a couple of lines of code, if that. There's plenty of web automation tools that do far, far more than this. There's one for skipping Youtube's in the Chrome store, and greasemonkey ones for skipping it on Steam.

The legal stuff never really catches on to utility, you're right, it probably just is for showing intent. I'm not sure what a court would do if someone had the automatic extensions installed.
Yeah that one doesn't make a ton of sense. You can still manipulate the controls. There are just a couple more of them and the difficulty isn't really any higher. I have a hard time imagining why someone would be looking to automate the process, outside of trying to skip the annoyance of manually entering stuff every time, which one wouldn't be near as motivated to do if they could just click "Yes."
Posted March 04, 2014
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Ixamyakxim: It's almost as if we've stumbled upon an ancient oath question, whereby if you answered truthfully, but in a way to disqualify yourself, you were somehow less qualified by said oath than if you had lied, to violate the very oath you had just sworn to, but by lying you were now approved.
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grimwerk: A friend of my dad's once wanted to be a cop. One of the questions on the application was, "Have you ever smoked marijuana?" He figured that many people had, and being as he was starting a career as a policeman, he should be honest. He'd tried it years previously, so he checked "yes". Immediate rejection.

The question was certainly nominally valid, given the anti-drug madness of the time, but I wonder if there was a "you should be savvy enough to know when to lie" aspect to it.
The police force probably don't care if candidates lie on that question, just so long as they have a piece of paper to cover themselves if some fancy lawyer somehow manages to show the candidate/policeman did smoke it during a drugs case.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussion (archive)What the heck is wrong with “Are you 18?”(41 posts)(41 posts)
(41 posts)