[dotancohen]

  > 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.

[Ichthypresbyter]

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.

[dotancohen]

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.

[Ichthypresbyter]

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.)

[ricardobayes]

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.

[indymike]

> 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?

[jimnotgym]

...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'.

[vidarh]

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.

[evanb]

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].

[hyperman1]

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.