You had better take the habit of not feeding all websites with your identity information.
Too many websites nowadays are asking too noisy questions and keeping track of them become more difficult everyday.
- Usually a website doesn’t need your exact date of birth, at most it may need your approximate age.
- It doesn’t need your real name either, even if it wants to deliver something to you, the address should be all it takes in many countries (although not everywhere). You could often use plausible nicknames. Humans will tolerate them, but exact-matching computer systems won’t. For example, if you were Nathaniel William such-and-such, you’d have a large supply: Nat, Nath, Natty, Nathan, Niel, Neil, Thaniel, N. W., William, Will, Willy, Bill, Billy, Liam.
- Usually a website doesn’t need your real email address neither; all it needs is some email alias that you are in control and you can delete. Despite each case is different and above suggestions may not apply to you or not always, it would be a good practice to follow them to protect your privacy, for spam management and security since it is harder to guess this information and to reuse it when leaked.
Not yet sure? Many users who gave too many details, for example to MySpace are today regretful (check link below). And there are millions of insecure websites out there asking you to fill in more data.
And if you still have an account -even if unused- you’d better read why you should delete your MySpace account.
