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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

You’d think that’d be prevented when they identity proof you with government identity credentials considering the immutability of your birth date.

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  > the immutability of your birth date.

Another falsehood programmers believe about dates. ))

When immigrants move across borders, often if there is no record of date of birth the date used is the first of January on a best-guess year, and sometimes even the year is wrong. Later this information could be updated. I know of a case of a man whose birthday (immigrant from China) went from January 1st, 1900 to some date in the late 1890s upon documentation being found, just slightly before his 100th (living) birthday.

There are, of course, also reasons for deliberately falsifying a birth date. Accessing an online service is one, false claim of benefits (e.g. pension) may be another, avoiding or enlisting in armed forces, purchasing age-restricted material, renting a hotel or vehicle, the list goes on. A robust system must account for these possibilities.

Yes, but you are designing a system based on a once in 100,000 edge case. There is no reason why such odd and rare requests can't be handled in a customer support request.

...If your customer service team are sufficiently well staffed, trained and have escalation points. In the article the customer service team couldn't even read a decision made by 'The Back End Team'.

You're seriously underestimating gow much this happens with current rates of immigration. 1 in 1000 to 1 in 5000 seems to be the correct rate in my country.

Besides, Even with 1 in 100k, with the US population of 330 million, you've created trouble for 3 300 people based on this edge case alone.

A more realistic case for you: People make far more mistakes than you think. Having done genealogy recently, the number of documents with people messing up their own birthdate or name is staggering. On top of the much larger number of registers where someone else have taken the information down wrong.

Or when there's a difference in convention. For example, the European convention dd/mm/yy[yy] and the US convention mm/dd/yy[yy].

> There is no reason why such odd and rare requests can't be handled in a customer support request.

Since we're in the middle of a bad customer service with no appeal discussion... can we assume you are joking?

While there are relatively few people in this specific situation still alive, my grandmother was born in a country that still used the Julian calendar at the time.

Not at all. Just last week my government approved a plan to bring in thousands (I think 3000 or 9000) of immigrants from Ethiopia, a large portion of whom do not have personal documentation.

I meant the specific situation of having been born under the Julian calendar.

(She was born in Greece in 1920- AFAIK Greece was the last country to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and did so in 1923.)

Modern example: my father, who is still living, driving, and traveling internationally.

When he was 15, his parents decided it was time for him to start driving his mother around, who never learned how to drive. They wrote down his birth year to make him appear 16. The Texas Department of Public Safety in the 60s wasn’t quite as strict about proof of identity as it is now.

Fast forward to the late 90s, and digitized driver’s licenses. Fortunately, my mother had an inkling that life for my dad might get a bit complicated with a driver's license that didn’t match his birth certificate, so she pushed him to get it corrected.

I imagine there are at least several thousand US citizens who have never lived elsewhere whose primary ID (driver’s license) shows a different birth year from the one on their birth certificates for similar reasons, and it’s a toss-up on which date they use for various purposes.

My grandmother "altered" her date of birth on her birth certificate so her husband wouldn't know she was older than he was.

That date ended up on their marriage certificate.

And then, after her husband passed away and she was approaching pension age, she realised she would only be eligible for the pension a few years later...

So DOB is not immutable.

(and another common source of DOB errors, mixing up the US MM-DD-YYYY versus the normal DD-MM-YYYY format used almost everywhere else...)

Not immutable for all.

There are people who escaped war zones with no papers behin

Syrians in Germany, Bosnians in Arizona and many other such examples in the UK.

They often provide 1.1.year as dob.

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