According to Hollywood conventional wisdom, everyone from the stars to the executives gets less bankable with every wrinkle, and will do anything to conceal evidence of aging — including, apparently, online evidence of their birth dates. To combat ageism, various Hollywood guilds, including both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, have asked the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), the largest and most popular movie site, to delete the birth dates of its members, reports The Wrap. Should IMDB comply, or should the Hollywood glamorati stop being prima donnas?
Ordinary Hollywood folk have a right to privacy, too: It's not just celebrities who face discrimination, says David Chen in Slash Film, but everyone from "below-the-line crew workers all the way to members of the writer's room." Further complicating matters, the data is sometimes wrong, and IMDB info is notoriously difficult to correct. "Everyday regular industry workers" should be able to control what information is available to would-be employers, whether it's age or anything else.
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