I woke up this morning to five identical emails from LiveJournal. Here’s my LiveJournal inbox:

What’s wrong with this picture?

1. I don’t ever need to be notified of my own birthday. It’s on my driver’s license if I forget it.
2. I don’t need to be notified of anyone’s birthday more than once. And five times in two hours? Really excessive.
3. I never asked LiveJournal to share my birthday with anyone, yet upon further investigation, I found that my birthday was set to be “shared with everyone.” Birthdates are often used to verify identity; they are a common target of identity thieves. No site should ever default to sharing user’s birthdates (or any other private information) with the universe. One nice way to mitigate this threat is to not include the birth year, which is not important when reminding people of each other’s birthdays.
4. The messages show my birthday as the nonexistent “December 00,” even though I entered my birthday as January 1st. (I never enter my real birthdate on any site; January 1st works because it’s easy to remember, and anybody who actually knows me will know January 1st is not right.)
5. If I actually wanted this feature, it would be nice to have more than two days to find a gift for someone.

I don’t actually use LiveJournal; I’ve only occasionally used my account to post a comment. I assume this is not indicative of the quality of the rest of their site.