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Forum Discussion
Message from Dropbox about completing date of birth by 1st September or lose Family Plan Access
Does anyone know how to update account details with your date of birth
the link to the article gives not details how to update your date of birth
Hi andy, Due to recent regulations, you...
- Hi all, sorry for jumping in.
I wanted to share the good news that the issue has been resolved.
Our team has been working hard on the matter, and everything should be back to normal now.
You can all enter your DOB, by following the link in the email that was sent.
Thank you for your feedback and reports.
Apologies for any frustration caused.
I have emailed support, so here is my email. If I am in error I am glad to hear so. I am a long-time user since the first time it was released. I was asked to confirm my age a few days ago. First time for me and my daughter. Fair enough except for the fact that she has been a user since last year and just joined my family plan a few months ago. Now she has 48 hours to migrate her files out before account deletion.
My email to Support:
I am very disappointed in the recent and frankly recent need to confirm my age as well as my 13-year-old daughter having to confirm her age. I paid for the family plan precisely to support her online learning workflow. We live in Japan. We are US citizens, but due to your policy, she has 48 hours to move the work she has been building there for the last several months into another cloud service we would rather not use.
Some questions before I make a decision about my current subscription:
- Why now? Why ask me (a user for over a decade!) to confirm my age?
- Why does my daughter have to do so three months after she joined my family plan? What sets Dropbox apart from iCloud's requirements (which allows her on my plan)?
- Why is 16 the non-US resident requirement?
- Would you be satisfied with a VPN workaround for traveling families like us?
- Can my daughter's inevitable account deletion be corrected in the next day or so with my consent?
Thank you, I really want to support your service as an educator and start-up entrepreneur working with online learning families, but this will not work with global learners and families operating online. Very sad if we cannot sort this out.
So there it is. I am open to the community giving me advice or helping me understand this. I have evangelized for Dropbox as a happy user for years since the team famously turned down Steve Jobs' offer to buy Dropbox. Maybe it's time to change?
Hi! I agree. This must be a major mistake from Dropbox, and was really upsetting. I don't know of any rules in my country (Norway) that prevents children for using dropbox, since the children's use of dropbox is entirely the parent's responsibility untill they are 18 years old.
The other option i see is that the account is transfered to me, and I am the responsible owner of it.
I sendt a similar request to support, and hope they get back quick.
HI Len L.2, I totally agree,
The concept of Age Gating by Dropbox seems ill conceived at best, a horrible "gotcha" at worst, I mean, what are they thinking? I, like you, have Dropbox Family for our family and my 11 year old's account now has 48 hours to download all... for what reason? I've also written to them but I reckon the solution will be to associate my own DOB to the account... which of course is what will most will be doing (not truthfully reporting their age), so what, in the end, is the point of all this?
I'm very disappointed in the waste of my time, that's for sure yet also am hoping they get back to me ASAP to resolve this. Cheers!- Megan
Dropbox Staff
Hey guys, thank you for posting here!
Your comments on this feature have been quite helpful, and I will do everything I can to ensure that your voice is heard. I will pass on your comments to the relevant departments so that we can further improve our product.
Keep in mind that this change happened in order for Dropbox to comply with legal regulations, which isn't something we can change at the moment because it doesn't fall within our scope of control.
I hope this clarifies.
Thank you, and we will keep that in mind. All the same (if you can bear with our frustration), the team should keep in mind that this is driving customers (like me) into the arms of other family plan cloud services that allow us to carry on without the hiccups.
At this point, the only advantage I would find with Dropbox is being a stand-alone cloud service without trapping users in any particular ecosystem. Well, that's gone when we can't include our kids, and that will hurt your education partners (again like me) who relied on this for teaching-sharing purposes in a growing ed-tech and remote learning world.
Please keep those points in mind.
Best,
Len
Many thanks Megan,
Can I say thank you for reaching out regarding the Age-Gating issue. I very much appreciate it.
If you have the time, it would be enlightening to be directed towards the legislation (US legislation, I presume) or regulation that Dropbox has had to comply with?
In short, it'd be really useful to read further as I imagine I was not the only Dropbox account holder to be effected negatively by this.In short, your users do appreciate what it's taken for Dropbox to deal with all this.
For my part, I ended up with a positive result and truly wish to thank the Support Team, particularly Addison, Jake and Nina. These individuals did a great job in resolving the age-gating in my case.
So all the best & cheers!
Ross
