My Mini Identity Protection

Last week, on April Fool’s Day, I woke up to find quite a few birthday congratulations in my email. I was surprised for a minute, and then I realized that quite a few of these were coming from Facebook. When I signed up, I used Apr 1 as my birthday, and so it triggered on a bunch of other people’s pages.

I’m not overly concerned with Identity Theft, but I do try to be prudent. One of those things that people use to validate identity is your birthday, so I hesitate to actually give mine out. It’s also that I don’t make a big deal of my birthday. Last year I actually went to a scout meeting with my son that night instead of celebrating.

For years, when I’ve been asked for a birthday, on ESPN, Facebook, almost anywhere, I’ve used Apr 1 as the date, and then a year that’s close to my own. Sometimes I got a year older or a year younger, but I want to try and prevent my birthday from being released when one of these places loses data.

And I’m sure one of them will.

So it was a fun surprise, and I’m sure that there are some downstream BI systems collecting all this data that are struggling to match up this Steve Jones with that one. :)