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from the Your-Personal-Details-Belong-To-Us-Dept dept.
Yammer, the Facebook clone for enterprises, now demands users to provide their date of birth to be able to access the network. The fallacy with this is that while saying "Verify your age to continue" it says "Enter your birthday to verify that you meet the age requirement to use Yammer." which doesn't make sense for a social network designed for work environments where it is a given that users will be of adult age.
Microsoft have stated (Microsoft account required) that this is due to the pending merge of Yammer with Microsoft 365, however it also states that if the organization using Yammer does not have any users under the age of 16 then this verification step of sending each user's date of birth to Microsoft is not required. This is being seen as another step by Microsoft towards killing Yammer in favor of "Microsoft Teams" which so far has very little traction in the social networking space. This may be one of the final nails in the coffin for the ailing social network for corporations.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Monday June 04 2018, @04:55PM (4 children)
Look, Microsoft is obviously doing its part to stop child labor. We should commend them for that!
Sarcasm aside... Any chance this has to do with GDPR or some regulation?
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Monday June 04 2018, @05:23PM
Go to your local video rental store. Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, any of them. And rent HOME ALONe 2: Lost in New York. Starring me -- and Macaulay Culkin. You'll change your mind about youth employment!
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday June 04 2018, @05:38PM (1 child)
Probably not connected with the GDPR, but Europe has been asking the various social media sites to ensure that age limits on usage are enforced. This is perhaps as much as any company can do in the short term to placate those voices, but as we all know typing in a date of birth hardly means that it is accurate or true.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 04 2018, @05:55PM
Ah, but then you've violated the TOS by entering false information.
And they already have your DOB anyway (harvested along with everything else they know), so they instantly know you are lying.
But don't worry. They won't use it against you - not now anyway.
They will sit on it till there is some reason for them or some government agency to throw you under a legal bus somewhere down the road.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:03PM
> Any chance this has to do with GDPR or some regulation?
Date of birth is personal information. Unless they can document that they have a need to know the specific date and not just how old the person is, it is thus information they are not allowed to collect.
So I guess the answer is yes. Assuming that someone at Microsoft took the GDPR and asked... "Google is still beating us on evil. How can we be more evil"?