<story><title>Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account</title><text>Dropbox released a &amp;quot;user age verification feature&amp;quot; today, which is a simple set of drop downs for you to fill in your birth date.&lt;p&gt;I made the mistake of choosing &amp;quot;2022&amp;quot; as my year of birth instead of my actual year of birth.&lt;p&gt;Obviously this is my mistake, but a warning to anyone else: I now have 48 hours to backup my files before I will be locked out of my account, and Dropbox support has been unable to confirm that they can fix the &amp;quot;issue&amp;quot; for me.&lt;p&gt;I think this is the single worst &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; I&amp;#x27;ve ever encountered in a software application. I&amp;#x27;m honestly shocked.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alpaca128</author><text>&amp;gt; Obviously this is my mistake&lt;p&gt;No, it isn&amp;#x27;t. 2022 should not be a valid date of birth in the first place. And the account being locked because of that should probably also not happen without additional checks.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s okay to have standards even when most UIs are bad.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: Dropbox user age verification feature can lock your account</title><text>Dropbox released a &amp;quot;user age verification feature&amp;quot; today, which is a simple set of drop downs for you to fill in your birth date.&lt;p&gt;I made the mistake of choosing &amp;quot;2022&amp;quot; as my year of birth instead of my actual year of birth.&lt;p&gt;Obviously this is my mistake, but a warning to anyone else: I now have 48 hours to backup my files before I will be locked out of my account, and Dropbox support has been unable to confirm that they can fix the &amp;quot;issue&amp;quot; for me.&lt;p&gt;I think this is the single worst &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; I&amp;#x27;ve ever encountered in a software application. I&amp;#x27;m honestly shocked.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>varenc</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been seeing age checks like this more and more.&lt;p&gt;Recently the FTC came down hard[0] on Kurbo (aka Weight Watchers) for not doing enough&amp;#x2F;anything to stop children under 13 (COPPA) from making accounts. Since they&amp;#x27;re not confident there&amp;#x27;s no children with accounts, now all Kurbo&amp;#x27;s data is tainted and they have to delete all user data and destroy any &amp;quot;algorithms&amp;quot; derived from that data.&lt;p&gt;Historically Dropbox probably never asked for a user&amp;#x27;s age so they might worry they could run into this problem in the future. The threat of all a company&amp;#x27;s data being tainted is a huge one, so of course they&amp;#x27;re now overreacting a bit.&lt;p&gt;p.s. hopefully you can get your account fixed, but if not, you could use the amazing rclone[1] tool to copy your files off. (it&amp;#x27;s rsync for cloud storage).  Or you could just put them in a folder shared with another DBX account.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ftc.gov&amp;#x2F;news-events&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;press-releases&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;ftc-takes-action-against-company-formerly-known-weight-watchers-illegally-collecting-kids-sensitive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ftc.gov&amp;#x2F;news-events&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;press-releases&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rclone.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rclone.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>