Message from Dropbox about completing date of birth by 1st September or lose Family Plan Access

@Hunter no, I'm sorry, but your response doesn't cut it! Your first response in this entire thread is AFTER it's resolved? Has your customer service team received any training whatsoever?

You should have been on this thread from the start posting hourly updates including verbose responses direct from your engineering team, with sensitive information removed, of course: the issue was reported, the issue was identified and logged and escalated internally, code was checked out, updated, pushed back into code repositories, testing teams and sandboxes were re-tasked etc etc.

This attitude displays a complete lack of customer empathy. You just want our revenue.

After I’ve got myself up off the floor. I complained on my ticket about the awful customer service and debacle amd this is their reply. What a way to treat customers 

 Thanks for contacting us.

My name is Sara, I work for the Account Security team with Dropbox, and I will be happy to help you with your request.

From my understanding you are unable to update your date of birth on your Dropbox account, correct?

Thanks for reporting this issue. This issue is now fixed and should be working properly.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thanks again for bringing this to our attention.

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:

1. Why now? Why ask me (a user for over a decade!) to confirm my age?
2. 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)?
3. Why is 16 the non-US resident requirement?
4. Would you be satisfied with a VPN workaround for traveling families like us?
5. 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!

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. 

I am a dropbox family plan user. When I logged into dropbox today on a computer that I havent used for a long time, it tells me to enter my birthday so i did what it told me to do, but then I forgot to check the year and I realized I have entered it wrongly to a year that is below dropbox user restriction and I have been told that the account will be locked in 2 days, how do I recover it?

Hey Tam122, how are you today? 

Would it be okay for me to send you an email, in order for us to have a closer look into this?

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