I like the old school simplicity of the FR. No nonsense and straight forward without any hidden tricks. I would like to see them lose Google, and trade for a server or in house analytics, but other than that it is hard to hide anything because of the simplicity of it.
As for the birth date issue... A simple “You agree that you are at least XX years old to enter” would suffice... Even if you ask for a birthdate they could lie anyhow. So it is no good and useless anyhow, why even have that birthdate field then?
Unless it is a tool for future positive identification? They already have your email address, they already have your IP and carrier info, and unless you are using a burn phone to connect to the net as a modem they have your name, address, and device serial number they can get from your carrier. The only thing left for a positive ID is your self supplied birthdate.
That is the problem now days, everyone is striving for more complication rather than simplicity. What is not truly needed just needs to be eliminated.
I’m going to respectfully disagree about FR and simplicity. You can’t even post a photo unless you brush up on HTML. You can’t block rude and profane posters that attack you, and trust me, as a woman on here I have experienced more nasty men posting the most rude things to me that ever I have on Twitter.
Yeah, this is the other thing you mention. They already have so much of our information we would probably be shocked. I have experienced more than once simply talking about an item I may wish to buy, NEVER having searched for it once and it started coming up on websites I visited. Spooky.
Also, as in my bio here and on other sites I post on such as Twitter I use my read name. I’m not afraid not to be anonymous anymore.