The ageing process

A while ago there was a lot of hoohar in the press about changes to Facebook privacy rules. 

I read a post on Twitter I think by a certain Mr Petzny which advised that if one didn’t fancy faffing around with one’s privacy settings all one needed to do was change one’s age on Facebook to be under eighteen.

Always happy to take advantage of a shortcut, the easy path, I changed my age to a youthful 15 years old.

More recently I was involved in some “work stuff” for which I needed to be able to change my Facebook profile to be a female over the age of 21, interested in fashion and living in Newcastle.  This would make me the perfect target for some advertising we were doing and I wanted to see the adverts.

I set about changing my location and interests but was unable to change my age back to something resembling reality.  Facebook insisted that as a minor under the age of 18 I should not be allowed to change my year of birth.

I wrote to Facebook and explained.  They wrote back and told me it was important I used my real date of birth and explained how to change my privacy settings if I didn’t want people to know how old I was.

I wrote back and explained that what I wanted was to let people know exactly how old I was.  And how on earth did they think it was possible for me to have left school in 1986 and Uni in 1990, be married and have children, aged eight and six, and yet only to be 15 years old myself?

They changed my profile and I’m back to my real age of 28.  Thank goodness.