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I'm still irritated about whatever bit or bits of sloppy coding ended up assigning 1/1/1970 as a birthdate for all contacts in my Google account that didn't have a birthdate specified. Combined with birthday notifications and more annoying alerts in older versions of Android or in the browser, it made for annoying New Years Day mornings with several hundred alerts.

Side note: I use 1/1/70 by default when entering birthdays. Only if it's something that I expect to matter - financial or medical institution - do I enter my real birthday.

Entering random dates is not a great idea because I seem to recall one site (Yahoo!, maybe?) insisting on me entering the correct birthday and I had no idea what I put in.

I usually do January 1 <sister's birth year> lol.

Or adding a middle name of “A” because some databases can’t handle that a person might not have a middle name or middle initial.

I have a fairly sophisticated user registration system that can't handle people without family names. We had to jump through some hoops to be able to enroll people who just have given names.

Must have been tough if you rolled out this system in Indonesia.