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Ask HN: Is it viable to use Facebook to verify age/gender?

2 points by lumberjack ↗ HN
I'm not really sure how hard it is to fake a Facebook profile and whether this can be effectively countered by say, only allow profiles who have existed for longer than a month and have more than 3 friends...etc

Or is there maybe a better way that is more user friendly?

6 comments

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dylz
No.
lumberjack
Well, can you explain why? Note that the application in question is not very critical. An error rate of ~5% would be acceptable.
tixocloud
Is there something that you're looking to do?
Someone1234
Technically it is viable, but realistically it will result in nobody using your service. If you talk to Facebook users, most are very wary these days about giving third parties access to their Facebook account as third parties have historically abused that access (to post things, spam their friends, etc).

Plus the strength of this approach is directly proportional to the level of reward. Without knowing what a person 'wins' if they successfully bypass your check, it is hard to know if the check itself is strong enough.

It ultimately isn't that hard to make a fake account and add three other random/fake accounts. Takes about ten minutes. Then wait a month. The question is, is the reward worth the hassle?

I don't have a better/alternative way of doing this. Online age verification is an on-going problem, and gender verification is a pandora's box (in particular related to LGBT issues).

josephpmay
No... many people create Facebook profiles before they're 13 with fake ages, and then it is difficult to change it to the correct age.
afarrell
You mention that you are willing to accept a 5% error rate. 5% is a bit higher than the Error Rate from Trolling of most surveys (see http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-...). Do your users have an incentive to falsify their gender which would push it higher than that?

Since gender is relevant, I assume you're making either a dating app, or an app that feeds into some sort of beureacracy. If the former, then people have an incentive to enter their real gender if they want to get any use out of the app. Linking to Facebook is a bad idea since people are usually kinda wary of linking their dating profile to other social media. If the latter, then facebook is not going to satisfy your stakeholder. You should consider asking for some form of ID or credit card.