There are dozens of scenarios where you may want to find out someone’s birthday. Perhaps you want to throw a surprise party for your crush and cannot risk letting him sniff it out. Or your bestie has been dropping hints here and there about her birthday but that special day has somehow slipped your mind.
In an online discussion1, some proposed being upfront and asking directly for someone’s date of birth. But if you’d rather keep your intentions veiled, there are a couple of more discreet ways you can go about it…
1. BeenVerified
BeenVerified is a popular tool to access someone’s public records (including birthday info). It doesn’t provide accurate birthdates of a person, but it does uncover someone’s birth month & year, contact information, family members, and social media profiles.
- Go to the BeenVerified Official Website.
- Enter the person’s name/phone number/email address, or social media username of the person, and click SEARCH.
- Wait for BeenVerified to build the report. From the report, you’ll learn all relevant information about him/her, their birth info included.
2. TruthFinder
TruthFinder is a popular go-to for uncovering accurate dates of birth information about people. Just enter a name, then within minutes, TruthFinder will process the data and dish up all available information into a comprehensive report. This may include their DOB, social media accounts, contact information, and so on, if available.
- Go to the TruthFinder official website.
- Pop in the name of the person whose exact date of birth you wish to find out and click Search.
- You’ll receive a detailed report. In order to view the report, you will need to purchase a membership plan that best fits your needs. Then click to view the report and you’ll see their available birth info.
The above image is a sample TruthFinder report. Actual TruthFinder reports may contain more or less information.
3. Intelius
Intelius is another people records website to search for someone’s date of birth privately and secretly. Just enter a name, phone number, or home address, then the Intelius search engine will provide a report containing available background information on that person.
- Go to the Intelius Official Website.
- Choose the search type: name, phone, and address (For email search, you’ll need to create an account), then enter the information and click Search.
- Within minutes, Intelius will gather the available associated public records for the individual you searched. To view the report, you will need to purchase a membership plan.
The above image is a sample Intelius report. Actual Intelius reports may contain more or less information.
4. Search by photo with Social Catfish
Starting out as a dating investigation service, Social Catfish combines finding people and verifying their identities. It is a compact 6-in-1 social media finder that allows you to find out someone’s birth information, by name, phone number, email address, image, username, and physical location.
With 200+ billion records in its database, the engine is not just limited to the US, but 100+ more countries and regions across the globe. This means that if you have someone outside of the US that you want to search, don’t look further than Social Catfish.
- Go to Social Catfish Official Website.
- Choose a search type, enter the information and click Search.
- Within minutes, you’ll receive a detailed report about the person you searched. This usually includes their DOB.
5. Spokeo
Spokeo is a top-notch people search tool that allows you to search names to retrieve the birthday information that belongs to that specific person. And all searches are done private – the people you searched will not be notified.
Here is how to use Spokeo to look up someone’s DOB.
- Go to Spokeo official website.
- In the search box, type in the first name, last name and state as suggested, then hit SEARCH NOW.
- Wait a while as Spokeo generates a report for your search.
- There you go – you’ll be presented with all information belonging to the person you search, birth information included.
6. Ask a mutual friend
Another effective approach is to discreetly ask a mutual friend if they happen to know the birthday. As one community poster found2, crowdsourcing ideas online didn’t reveal the date they needed.
I just asked my friend who is also her friend lololololool and it’s the 27th”
, the user circled back later and posted. Even though their initial request for subtle ways to find out their friend’s birthday led to questionable suggestions, reaching out to a trusted mutual contact proved successful.
The key is making sure the mutual friend won’t spill the beans or prank you. Even if they don’t know the exact date offhand, they may provide helpful clues to narrow it down. And if you want to be extra discreet, tell them to keep your birthday inquiry just between you two. With a mutual friend, you can get the intel you need without letting on that you were subtly snooping.
7. Use the power of social media
Social media is one of the great places where you can find birthdates of a person, since nowadays most of us have been using more than one social media and most people wouldn’t mind sharing birthdays on social media platforms. Before diving in, you can think about which platform he or she uses the most and start your digging there. Usually, all you have to do is scroll through their profiles and posts – the steps are more of the same and here I take Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Linkedin as examples.
On Facebook, there are three ways you can find out someone’s birthdate: simply log into your account, then pull up their profile, and go to
- About page > Contact and Basic Info > Birthday to see if they have filled in their birthday information.
- Even > Birthdays and see if the person’s birthday is showing up as upcoming.
- Facebook timeline, then scan the timeline to see if you can find a group of birthday celebration posts made over the past years.
Note: While Facebook’s birthday notifications can help reveal someone’s special day, this feature doesn’t always work as expected. Some users3 have reported that despite having the privacy settings enabled, no notification was sent to their friends about their birthday. So you can’t always rely on Facebook’s automated birthday reminders to tip off a friend’s date of birth.
On Instagram, there is no specific section where you can go and check someone’s personal information. But you can still do your digging on the platform. To do so, simply log into your account, use the search function to find out their Instagram profile, then check out their bio, scour over their previous posts (especially tagged posts if you both follow each other), stories, the posts of the friends who they have been close with, or, you can even try with hashtags such as #birthday to see if you can get hold of the information or any clues that may lead you to it.
Snapchat
Snapchat displays a birthday cake emoji next to users’ names on their special days. This makes it a very good opportunity to figure out someone’s birthday if they know that big day is on the horizon. Otherwise, you may need to hop on and check every day, which takes a bit of patience and legwork.
Linkedin is a social network for professionals and businesses. If the person whose birthday you’d like to know has a LinkedIn profile, you can visit their profile, and then scroll through their bio and posts to see if any birthday posts come up. Beware, though, the person will be notified of your visit – so if you do want to try your luck there, get yourself a plausible explanation of why you showed up there.
Best gift ideas for 2023
Once you’ve successfully uncovered someone’s birthday using the methods mentioned above, why not surprise them with a gift to show your care? When it comes to finding the perfect gift, Amazon is your go-to destination.
Amazon offers a vast selection of gifts that cater to virtually every age, taste, and hobby. Whether you’re shopping for a tech enthusiast, a book lover, a fitness enthusiast, or even a pet lover, you’re bound to find a gift that will bring them joy (or surprise)!
Here are some amazing gift ideas:
Gifts for Her
Gifts for Him
How we chose our recommendations
When compiling this list of methods for finding someone’s birthday without asking directly, we looked for tools and techniques that are accessible, easy to use, and provide reliable results.
The people search sites recommended, like BeenVerified, TruthFinder, and Spokeo, are leaders in the industry with large databases to search through. They offer different capabilities to uncover birth date information, from month and year to full date details. We chose options with free trials or lower-cost memberships to remove barriers to trying them out.
For social media platforms, we focused on those that are most widely used like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. These sites have features that make discovering birthdays possible if users have shared that information publicly. Checking them leverages the personal connections and engagement people already have on these networks.
The birthday gift ideas highlighted at the end come from Amazon, which provides unmatched selection and convenience. We picked thoughtful gifts across categories like self-care, tech accessories, and leisure to appeal to different recipient interests and personalities. Highly rated, quality products were chosen to help make gift buying easy.
The methods and recommendations aim to provide diverse, straightforward ways to potentially find someone’s birthday that align with different situations and comfort levels. Our goal was to compile actionable suggestions readers could consider to uncover this date detail without directly asking the person.
That’s it – seven methods to help you investigate your friend’s birthday without asking them directly. Hopefully, it has helped. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, please let me know in the comments. Thanks.
References:
- r/AskReddit [NageleRules]. (2021, April 25) How do you subtly ask a friend for their birthdate without revealing to them that you’re not sure when their birthday is? [Online forum post]. Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/mxr7fp/how_do_you_subtly_ask_a_friend_for_their/ ↩︎ - Friends, Family, and Colleagues [Anonymous]. (2020, June 07) How to ask someone when their birthday is subtly or their friends? [Online forum post]. TheStudentRoom.
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6580114 ↩︎ - r/facebook [Donutdude727]. (2023, July 30) Facebook not notifying friends of birthday? [Online forum post]. Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/15dcv78/facebook_not_notifying_friends_of_birthday/ ↩︎
Image credit: Feature image by Angelina Yan on Unsplash
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There’s no guarantee you’ll find the information you’re looking for with the tools discussed in this article. They all source their information from publicly available data sources, such as county, state and federal courts, government departments, and police records, and those sources may contain incorrect or incomplete data. It’s illegal to use these tools to make decisions about employment, admission, consumer credit, insurance, tenant screening, or any other purpose that would require FCRA compliance. Read the Fair Credit Reporting Act to learn more....About this article
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