The other day — it’s taken me a while to get objective about this — I clicked on an email from X (formerly known as Twitter) to see the post. A very annoying little box asking for my birthdate came up. So I clicked on the “X” in the corner to get rid of it. But it wouldn’t go away.
I don’t like giving my birthdate. It’s private information. It’s MY information. It doesn’t belong to anyone but me.
And let’s not forget all those warning about not giving out private information — especially your birthdate.
I’ll provide my birthdate to those who need to have it, but not just because they ask for it.
And I don’t really trust that “We protect your privacy” blurb. Really? How many times do we hear about breaches into databases? Into very huge, secure places. Like governments. So I don’t really believe that line.
The only reason X would want my birthdate is for demographic information to sell to advertisers. Which brings me to a second important point: I am not a commodity to be bought and sold.
Other sites asks for demographic information, such as age group. Yes, group, not individual particularized birthdates. I give my age group to those sites.
So I got suspicious. Why does X want my birthdate? It can’t be for demographic reasons, because they’d have asked for my age group. (Advertisers don’t want particularized birthdates, just age groups.)
After fuming for about an hour, I relented and tried to enter my birthdate. The nice empty box for my birthdate wouldn’t let me put anything in. Up popped another annoying calendar-month box. The only way to get to my date of birth was by clicking back month by month by month by month.
That has made me very cautious about X. Specifically, the motives and general-intelligence-about-how-people-actually-behave of the person(s) who wrote this particular bit of programming. Why on earth would they do this? It couldn’t be because they might lack the knowledge about how to program, because they’d have to be able to do a lot more complicated things in order to work at any tech company. So that couldn’t be the reason.
Does X want to punish its subscribers?
Stop and think for one second or two. A 10-year old would have to click back at least 120 times to get to the month they were born in. A 20-year old at least 240 times. And if you’re older, a lot more than 240 times. That is not pleasant. It’s an irritant at best, and a punishment at worst.
Who would click back over 240 times to enter a birthdate? Not a real human being. But a robot would have no problem with that.
And I am not a robot!!
So here we have an organization that is waives the freedom banner — specifically, freedom of speech — that insists on having a very personal piece of information in order to have access to its site. Selling our personal information for access is not, and has never been compatible with freedom.
And to make the pain of giving up private information even more excruciating, requiring that we behave like an automated robot and click away for a l-o-n-g time on a button to get access.
I repeat: I am not a robot.
It’ll take a while for my sense of humour to kick in, because this is so irritatingly wrong. I suspect it’ll tie in the “X” on the calendar-month box with the name “X”.
I did without Twitter for years, and I can do without X.
