Stop Asking for Date of Birth: It’s Not Cute, It’s Dangerous
Asking for a birthday seems harmless until you realize you are holding the master key to someone's identity. Stop the automated greetings; start the risk management.
The Toxic “Nice-to-Have”
Open your CRM. Look at the contact fields. Name. Email. Company. And there it is, sitting innocently between ‘Job Title’ and ‘LinkedIn URL’:
Date of Birth.
I ask my clients why they collect this. The answer is almost always the same, accompanied by a shrug. “The field was there.” Or, even worse, “We like to send a little note on their birthday.”
This is amateur hour.
You are not a grandmother sending a card with a crisp $20 bill. You are a business holding sensitive information. When you collect a Date of Birth, you are not collecting a fun fact. You are collecting a Category 1 Identity Vector.
With a name, an address, and a Date of Birth, a bad actor can do significant damage. They can reset passwords. They can access banking verification questions. They can steal an identity.
The Liability: Holding the Grenade
When you store data you do not need, you are holding a grenade for someone else. You gain zero utility from it, but you take 100% of the blast if it goes off.
Let us analyze the risk-reward ratio of the “Birthday Email.”
- The Reward: The client receives a generic, automated email that says “Happy Birthday [First_Name].” They delete it in 0.4 seconds. They know it is automated. It feels hollow.
- The Risk: You are now legally required to protect that data string with high-level encryption. If your junior associate leaves a laptop on a train, or if your “secure” cloud provider has a leaky bucket, you must inform the regulators that you lost Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
Is the email worth the lawsuit? Enfin, is it worth the stress?
We must stop treating data fields as if they are free. Every field is a door you must lock. The more doors you build, the harder it is to secure the house.
The Safeguard: Delete the Defaults
The solution is aggressive subtraction.
Go to your forms today. Look at every field that asks for personal details—Home Address, Spouse’s Name, Date of Birth. Ask yourself: “If I do not have this, does the project fail?”
If the answer is no, the field must go.
If you genuinely want to acknowledge a client, send them a gift when you close a deal. Send them a bottle of wine when they refer a new client. That is relevant. That is professional.
But asking for their birthday on a signup form is presumptuous. It is like asking a stranger for their house keys because you might want to drop by and water their plants someday.
It is tacky, and it is dangerous.
Real luxury is safety. When a client works with us, they should feel that their secrets are safe—mostly because we were smart enough not to ask for them in the first place.
Clean your database. Remove the birthdays. You will sleep better, and frankly, your clients won’t miss the automated emails.
FAQs
But our CRM requires a birthdate field!
Then enter 01/01/1900 for everyone. Do not let a software vendor dictate your risk profile.
How will we make clients feel special on their birthday?
Send them excellent work on the other 364 days. That is more memorable than a generic e-card.
What if we need to verify age for legal reasons?
Then verify it, but do not store it. Check the ID, note that they are 'Over 18', and let the specific date vanish.