I am alarmed by DOB handling

[Nathan Hawks]

Hello,

I have lurked here a while, and now have been to write the list by Sean Tilley. Sean asked me to explain why I believe the current handling of user dates-of-birth on joindiaspora.com is superlatively bad.

As succinctly as possible, I see three problems:

1. By default, joindiaspora.com users share their birth dates with any person they follow.
2. Short of falsifying the birthdate, there is no remedy for the above.
3. If I falsify my birthday, I might forget the falsified information; a potential problem should I ever need to recover my account.

The first of those three is, to me, the most severe issue. To me, this makes Diaspora bad for the people who use it, for privacy reasons, because this situation propagates personal information - something which Diaspora's entire image contradicts, and which many Kickstarter dollars were pledged for (disclosure: none mine). So, I am baffled and somewhat alarmed by this handling of DOB's, and by those who don't see a major problem here.

Can anyone at the intersection of development and privacy policy, weigh in ...particularly on the question of why this is not seen as a major concern, worthy of an immediate fix?

Thanks,

Nathan

[Raven24]

Hi Nathan!

I think it's great you care about people's privacy so much! That's why we're here.

Actually, all the information you give away on your profile page is completely optional, including the birthday.
Account recovery happens via the email address you specified during registration.

If you like we can turn this into a feature request for an option to display a person's age instead of the birthdate?
Do you have any more ideas how this could be solved?

- Florian

[Kurt Padilla]

As far as feature requests go, I would like to ability to divide my profile into sections and then select which aspects can see each section.

However, don't think that this is a high priority issue. To my understanding, a pod's admin would still be able access your profile content regardless of what apsects you put him in. Therefore, it's best to only share on Diaspora that which you feel comfortable sharing publicly, or at least with your pod admin.

Kurt

Sent from my Android phone.

[Nathan Hawks]

Hello, Florian,

Can you please direct me toward instructions for optional display of birthdate? it's been a couple months since I've looked, but no such option has has yet revealed itself to me — unless what you mean is changing the data.

In addition to your suggestion to create the feature request you describe, I think it's important that new users default to anything but showing birthdates, outside perhaps the family perspective.

Nathan

[Sean Tilley]

I wonder if there would be a simple way to just have some kind of filter for user fields, something that just calls the Aspects into consideration when a profile is being viewed?

Just something like a drop-down next to the field in the user settings strikes me as a simple enough way to deal with it. We could actually probably make use of additional fields that way, so that a person can add as much about themselves as they like, but hide it from any users they don't want to see it.

There was a much more complex idea in the past of having "Per-Aspect Profiles", in which a profile could look entirely different depending on what Aspect a profile was being displayed to. I think it'd be awesome to see that actually be done, but I can't even imagine what would need to be done on the technical side of things.

-S

[Nathan Hawks]

the suggestion below sounds both relatively simple (attach the same aspects chooser menu, as is currently used for general postings) and effective – especially if birthdates defaulted to private or family. but that's speaking merely from OOP experience, I haven't looked at diaspora's code at all.