Livejournal: blogging should only exist between a man and a woman

[tzikeh]

SIGNAL BOOST:

Quoted from synechdochic's lj:

Livejournal is making gender a mandatory field for account creation, and is removing "unspecified" as an option.

Your options are... (three guesses, and the first two don't count) Male or Female.

Go to http://www.livejournal.com/contact/?dept=feedback and... give feedback. Try not to cause Tokyo post-Godzilla-like destruction (as I am often inclined to do).

I haven't really had the necessary time or serious enough inclination to dig into my dreamwidth account, but it looks like that time is drawing nigh.

BTW, I have twelve unused invites for dreamwidth at the moment. Need, want, comment.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Oh, bloody hell. Cretins.

I don't like Dreamwidth, but I sure am going to go give my two cents worth at LJ feedback.

[xebgoc.livejournal.com]

I just left a note saying essentially 'you have no need for this information. remove the requirement that it be mandatory.' short and sweet.

[kirbyfest.livejournal.com]

Done. Thanks for posting.

[misachan.livejournal.com]

I sent comment asking that the options not be limited to male or female. We'll see how things go.

[grace-om.livejournal.com]

WTF?

[hubbit.livejournal.com]

I came. I saw. I gave them a piece of my mind.

[klia.livejournal.com]

I did NOT need another reason to hate LJ. And I'm not even conflicted about my own gender, FFS, but if forced to specify, I've always, ALWAYS taken the neutral option or, in DW's case, "rather not say," because it's none of anyone's damn business. That really pisses me off.

[hubbit.livejournal.com]

So, I sent my protest mail. I got a form response that I'm still trying to decide whether it reflects actual conditions, or whether LJ is backpedaling in the face of mass protest. But here's their response:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us with your concerns. We understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that understanding for our users.

At this time, the code you reference is not live on the site, and will not become so in the future. We know that you, and many other users, have serious concerns about any requirement to specify gender, so we'd like to take a moment to explain events and our position further.

The intention of this code was to change the sign-up process to include a field for the selection of gender; that the code would completely disable the "Unspecified" option at the same time was deemed unacceptable. While the code in question had gone to our beta (testing) server, it had not gone to our production server, and will not do so due to this problem. Furthermore, we'd like to clarify that code posted to the changelog community is not always final, as such code must then go through the beta testing process and can often be changed before actual implementation.

Additionally, some erroneous information has been spread regarding the potential public display of the gender field. We would like to clarify that gender is not currently publicly displayed on the profile, nor anywhere else on the site, and there are no plans to change this behavior.

Regards,
LiveJournal Community Care Team

[phoenix64.livejournal.com]

The updates on synecdochic's post seem to suggest that this got pulled like whoa.

[principia-coh.livejournal.com]

I changed my gender to Unspecified, went to Feedback last night, and politely informed them that not only was it a privacy issue (because a given user's gender is not something the LiveJournal ownership has a legal need to know, unlike their age), but that even if they could demonstrate a valid need their options would have to include something besides male/female, which could be either 'unspecified' or 'decline to answer.'

Don't know how much weight a permanent member carries, since they've effectively gotten all the moolah out of me they're ever going to get unless I buy something for another person, but I got the same canned response someone else has already posted here.

My personal guess as to why they wanted the gender information is to gather demographics to offer up to their advertisers.

[hubbit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I figured the response I received was canned. It was too "pat", covered all the bases too well, and sounded way too much like something written by a PR person.