I like using a date of birth of 1 January. It's plausible but also hopefully suspicious how many people seem to be born that day if others do the same.

▲

brk 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I use the 1st of my birth month. Slightly less suspicious? It's at least a little easier to remember. Generate fake profiles and identities usually is easier when you have bits that are rooted in your actual reality. Like, you have the same zodiac sign either way in this case, so you don't have to remember two of everything. Or if you're talking about a birthday trip, or related birthday thing from the past, details about the weather would be consistent, etc.

▲

cheschire 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But if an attacker gets your fake birthday and uses that to successfully reset credentials on another site that uses the same fake birthday?

At some point it becomes your birthday of record as far as the internet is concerned. Doesn’t matter what the actual record says.

	▲	rlpb 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If an attacker can do that, they could also do that with my real birthday had I used that. My birthday isn't a secret against anyone who wants to look hard enough. Therefore this method doesn't provide any kind of security against attackers gated only on knowing my registered birthday. I never claimed that it did.
	▲	dannyw 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No service should use date of birth for password resets.

▲

toilet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I heard from a number of Syrian refugees that this is actually very common in countries like theirs, where births may not be recorded, records are lost or destroyed. Some people don't even know their exact date of birth and they would typically enter January 1st on forms like this too.

	▲	inopinatus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		A common case even in stable, industrialised, first-world nations. Bottom line, it’s a false assumption that everyone knows the date or even year of their birth, quite apart from being willing to disclose it or able to prove it. I can also reveal that parents routinely mix up the DoB of their kids, and the more kids they have the worse this becomes, and I realised at some point during my association with club-level sport that it is a direct consequence of how tired they are

▲

richrichardsson 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same, my D.O.B. is 1/1/1970 for anything that doesn't justify having the real deal.

	▲	indigo945 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's also great for integration testing their systems, if they have any code in a language where datetimes are a value type.