Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zadokshi 666 days ago
Yes, i don’t understand why anyone would ever enter real personal details into any website unless it was absolutely required for correct functionality of the website. Is it older people having a more overall general trust of institutions? or is it all ages that do this?
3 comments

The problem is if you forget the fake details you can't recover the account. I was born around 1900 for my old yahoo groups email, but I forgot when exactly and so I got emails for a group I no longer cared about until (not sure what died, yahoo groups or the list)
Store the fake details in your password manager.
I didn't hear of a password manager for another decade. Even if I had I'm now depending on it evisting (as opposed to lost in a disc crash or something)
If I think the fake details will be used for account recovery, and I actually care about the account, I store them in my password manager. (custom fields or notes in Bitearden).
Why not? It’s honestly a pain entering fake data and then realizing it won’t work on the next page. Easier to let the browser autofill it.

I junk-fill some signup forms and use Hide my Email for others, but it’s never less work than just using real data (well, with few exceptions like WiFi registration pages that I encountered before and don’t require data validation)

>Is it older people having a more overall general trust of institutions? or is it all ages that do this?

If I had to guess, probably a combination of baby boomers (really old people) and Gen XZers (really young people).

Those of us who grew up with the internet (me, millenials) got drilled in to never ever fucking never share our real name or street address. That 18/F/CA in the chatroom? That's a middle age GIRL (Guy In Real Life).