This is pretty interesting. It mentions that Millennials and Zoomers are the two "Natively Online" generations, the only two generations that grew up with this technology available from a young...
This is pretty interesting. It mentions that Millennials and Zoomers are the two "Natively Online" generations, the only two generations that grew up with this technology available from a young age. Millennials are less likely to fall for these scams though.
I wonder if it's more because of our parents. Born in 92, I had access to the internet very early on, but colored through the lens of my parents. They were still very cautious about it.
I also remember Cartoon Network having ads for their website and saying "Get your parents permission to check out CartoonNetwork.com!" and then I actually did it. 'Hey mom, can I go print off Courage the Cowardly dog coloring book pages from the internet?'
They were also very fearful about putting any personal information onto the web. I remember sitting with my mom, birthday money in hand, in cash, and asking her if I could give it to her in exchange for her purchasing something for me off the internet. In the mid 2000's. She was skeptical as hell.
What I'm getting at, is I wonder if parents of Zoomers, being younger themselves, and being better versed in technology and the internet than the older parents of millennials had a more laissez-faire attitude and didn't cultivate a level of skepticism in this younger generation.
Also 92, and I agree for the most part about the cautiousness, but I think there's something else that's often glossed over (though I saw an article posted here a week or two ago with conversation...
Also 92, and I agree for the most part about the cautiousness, but I think there's something else that's often glossed over (though I saw an article posted here a week or two ago with conversation similar to what I'm going to say, anyway), and that's the fact that natively online and natively tech literate are very different things.
We grew up with desktop computers and a need to troubleshoot and fix things ourselves when there were problems. Gen Z grew up mostly with tablets and cell phones where everything "just works" first and foremost. If something horrible happens? All your important stuff is saved to the cloud, just factory reset your phone or tablet.
It feels like very late Gen X and Millennials are the only generation that have an inherent bias towards technological literacy. I've met younger people through RPGs, and even though they have desktops/laptops/whatever, they don't even know how to install an adblocker. I had to walk them through what amounted to a two-step process of "find link, click link."
And obviously this is all generalized, and I assume online demographics of our generation are going to inherently trend towards technological literacy and privacy concerns more than the average person, but my anecdotal evidence is very much that once cell phones and tablets became the norm, there was a significant trend downward.
I think this is a big part of it. I know my experience doesn't generalize but my introduction to computers was very nuts-and-bolts. My dad and I built all our PCs, older PCs got repurposed into...
I think this is a big part of it. I know my experience doesn't generalize but my introduction to computers was very nuts-and-bolts. My dad and I built all our PCs, older PCs got repurposed into servers, MS licenses were limited so Linux was used when a key wasn't available. Which often meant compiling a kernel and doing some medium intensity dev work. We used the server to host all sorts of things, webapps, email, websites, game lobbies etc.
But I don't feel "natively online" really. Things like instagram, snapchat, etc. are lost on me. I'm much more comfortable in Discord or on a website like Tildes.
I wonder what percentage of people who frequent this site regularly use Instagram or Snapchat. Personally I can't stand them... I have also been trying to convince my wife to move away from...
I wonder what percentage of people who frequent this site regularly use Instagram or Snapchat. Personally I can't stand them... I have also been trying to convince my wife to move away from telegram as they are integrating stories now.
Agreed about the part where today's walled garden mobile platforms are terrible at teaching tech literacy. But I'd also caution against generalizing across our entire generation. We might not...
Agreed about the part where today's walled garden mobile platforms are terrible at teaching tech literacy. But I'd also caution against generalizing across our entire generation. We might not notice it much in our day-to-day, but vast swaths of our generation didn't get too involved in tech during their formative years. Sure, maybe they had ICQ on their family computer, but they didn't get burned trying to download .isos from shady websites. They're a bit more literate, probably in the "following straightforward instructions" and "spotting a scam" departments, but I would expect most of the variance to exist within the generations, not across them. That is, the differences in tech literacy have two components: One explained by generations ("boomers and zoomers dum, hur hur") and one not explained by that (you being literate, but your classmates not - for a much more diverse set of reasons than the first ones). I've met very savvy boomers, and within IT (so only looking at people working in tech, duh) I don't think Gen Z is noticably less tech literate.
I meant more in the sense of like (random numbers out of thin air) 20% of millennials vs 5% of gen Z or something like that, rather than anything significant on either end. Just a lot more of one...
But I'd also caution against generalizing across our entire generation.
I meant more in the sense of like (random numbers out of thin air) 20% of millennials vs 5% of gen Z or something like that, rather than anything significant on either end. Just a lot more of one than the other.
I know I've heard a lot of stories from teachers and tech support people about how kids these days are more in line with the retirees than millennials when it comes to tech literacy. I think it...
I know I've heard a lot of stories from teachers and tech support people about how kids these days are more in line with the retirees than millennials when it comes to tech literacy. I think it makes sense. They've grown up in an era where you basically don't need to ever even install anything. You just tap the "get" button and then a few moments later, you can stream anything you want. You don't need an ability to critically think while troubleshooting. If something doesn't work these days, in 99% of cases the fix is either reboot or wait for an update. There's no need to find a community to discuss something you're interested in. Forums are mostly a thing of the past so you just search for what you want with reddit at the end and you've found a subreddit. Or you just use a hashtag on anything else I guess? They're on Twitter and Instagram and I assume tiktok so you just search for that and now you've found everyone in the world who wants to discuss what you like and that's obviously better than finding a niche community that suits your personality, right?
I sort of agree with this too. I'm just about to hit 44 and have been fortunate enough to be able to use a PC since the 80s, getting online around 14ish when the web was still pretty new. Because...
Exemplary
I sort of agree with this too. I'm just about to hit 44 and have been fortunate enough to be able to use a PC since the 80s, getting online around 14ish when the web was still pretty new. Because it was new, not many people were paying much attention, nor were there as many marks as there are now to rob and scam for money or advertise to.
People around my age and up that were using computers got to grow up with the web and as new things were invented we were slowly drip fed scam after scam to the point that we probably have developed good Internet 'street smarts'. A good scam will still get us, but the low-hanging fruit is easy to see coming.
But this felt like a small subset of people. The general population was busy making fun of computer nerds and how weird we were. But things were growing, the body of information available online grew and grew exponentially, along with the tools to help create that technolgy.
Granted my age is probably a factor here, but at 16/17 I had a geocities webpage made from and html 3.0 book I managed to beg my parents to buy me made in notepad and/or ms dos editor (if on the 'older' computer that I'd floppy disk over to the newer computer to upload via modem). I wouldn't have had the slightest idea how to stand up a webserver or even think that you could host it over a modem.
2001, I'm now following guides online and running IIS/Apache and writing ASP pages. My programming info comes from a mix of being in college, books, and internet. The tools are arriving, MS frontpage will get you up and running, a few people know webpages are cool and want one, and that's the tool they use.
I think this is about the time I'd say the average millennial is hitting the same age I got online. Now they are more likely to have a computer in the house, more likely to be able to find information how to do things if they want it, and have tools to ease them in to computing tasks which they can then launch into maybe more sophisticated ones if interested. But, the stuff isn't nice yet, it isn't everywhere. We all don't have a plug into the internet living in our pockets yet, so you still need to learn a thing or too.
And now add another 10 years. Everything JUST WORKS. I know we want to complain about the latest windows this and that but the thing just works, hardware just works when you plug it in, drives update on their own, all your game run without crashing. You want a computing service, there is a website or program that does it for you, just point your browser at it. In 2001 I installed the php gallery software on my IIS server to share photos with my friends that I took off my cool digital camera. Pretty soon we all have dropbox then phones that just put it right on the cloud. When learning docker the tutorial had me stand up a functional webserver with like 1 or 2 commands.
Whatever you want with computers exists already and is made by some dedicated team of people trying to make money off it working 40+ hours a week at getting it better everyday. If you want to learn computers now you would do so because you like it, not cause you have to, and I think thats is where we sit right now.
If I were 14 today, I'd have access to incredible tools and knowledge. Who knows what I could have done with the motivation and energy I had back then. But, I also could have not thought that the internet and computers were real life magic and just as soon went on to do something entirely else too. So the savvy user of today is someone who wants to know it, and is going to know way, way more. But the general sea of people aren't going to be forced to learn like the millennial was, and I really do think that is what accounts for the strange lapse of general computing knowledge we see in the younger generation today.
That's gotta be it. Creating online accounts used to be as easy as picking a username and password. Nowadays a ton of things require name, email, pw, address, phone, date of birth, etc. So I can...
What I'm getting at, is I wonder if parents of Zoomers, being younger themselves, and being better versed in technology and the internet than the older parents of millennials had a more laissez-faire attitude and didn't cultivate a level of skepticism in this younger generation.
That's gotta be it. Creating online accounts used to be as easy as picking a username and password. Nowadays a ton of things require name, email, pw, address, phone, date of birth, etc. So I can see how a zoomer who grew up used to inputting their entire set of info online for every little thing naturally becomes more relaxed with their info compared to their millennial counterparts who maybe still hesitate a bit when some random website asks you for your real-life phone number and address.
Well. As a millennial with a step child zoomer who is 18 I don't think it's this. We pounded in the fact that nothing online can be inherently trusted. Don't just buy stuff from unknown websites...
Well. As a millennial with a step child zoomer who is 18 I don't think it's this. We pounded in the fact that nothing online can be inherently trusted. Don't just buy stuff from unknown websites etc. But none of that stuck. There is an inherent trust most of that generation has with what they see online. Social media means nothing is personal or private so that information is freely given.
There is this zoomer who decided to use my email address for everything he signed up for. I have everything about him except his SSN. I even texted him letting him know what he was doing. Not a care in the world. Just crazy.
Bingo! The expectation of privacy is lost for these kids, and I think a lot of them don't see it as something worthwhile to protect. And really, who can blame them? Your privacy is bought and sold...
Social media means nothing is personal or private so that information is freely given.
Bingo! The expectation of privacy is lost for these kids, and I think a lot of them don't see it as something worthwhile to protect.
And really, who can blame them? Your privacy is bought and sold every day, no matter what you do. It's not like people opt in to Trans Union or Equifax. Credit monitoring happens whether you want it to or not.
I don't think we'll really understand the full impact for a number of years yet.
Not unique to Zoomers, as least accidentally using someone else's e-mail. There's been stories floating around as long as I remember of people using fist.last@gmail even though their real is...
There is this zoomer who decided to use my email address for everything he signed up for. I have everything about him except his SSN. I even texted him letting him know what he was doing. Not a care in the world. Just crazy.
Not unique to Zoomers, as least accidentally using someone else's e-mail. There's been stories floating around as long as I remember of people using fist.last@gmail even though their real is last44@yahoo as their e-mail and the "real" First Last receives all their bank statements and gas bills. The total indifference, however, may be a modern innovation.
I was born in '85 so I wasn't terribly young when the internet started becoming available around me. In my experience, a lot of the caution I've learned to exercise has come at the cost of...
I was born in '85 so I wasn't terribly young when the internet started becoming available around me.
In my experience, a lot of the caution I've learned to exercise has come at the cost of manually fighting viruses I downloaded myself from Kazaa, or a less-than-reputable download site, or whatever other foolish link I could find to click.
I've reinstalled my operating system for a fresh start more times than I care to admit. At one point, I had to download DBAN to fully wipe out a troublesome bug that just wouldn't quit.
Ultimately, I learned how to defend myself not from malicious keyloggers and people trying to sell me "software" for the "virus detected" but from myself. It's just not worth the time and stress trying to fight malware to click on something I'm not (reasonably) sure is safe.
Then again, my parents had me fairly late in their lives so their concept of technology use has always been a little more outdated than other parents'. When my mom wanted to punish me she didn't change passwords or anything, she pulled the phone cable out of the router and hid it.
Its kind of funny, I grew up the same way. My parents similarily cautious, especially with sensitive information. The same dad called me perplexed 20 years later, because he entered his phone...
Its kind of funny, I grew up the same way. My parents similarily cautious, especially with sensitive information. The same dad called me perplexed 20 years later, because he entered his phone number into some obscure crypto maximalist pyramid scheme scam site and was suddenly receiving around 10-20 calls per day from random numbers around the globe, unable to block them.
Some loosely related family member literally believes anything written on the most idiotic blogs. 5g, bill gates vaccecine population control, fake moon landing and healing crystals. It took less than a year to get her fully absorbed into the bizarro world rabbit hole. A person who used to be very skeptical of the web itself.
It appears to me that some part of the skeptical parents are now running blindly into the traps not following their own advice.
Actually, I think the internet is most "unsafe" today. It probably/partly is because internet got wide spread and today everyone is online. Back then (1998 when I got first connected) only...
Actually, I think the internet is most "unsafe" today.
It probably/partly is because internet got wide spread and today everyone is online. Back then (1998 when I got first connected) only enthusiasts and (PC) knowledgable people got connected. It's easy for the bad guys to get their victim today, even uneducated people or kids can browse web on their phones.
There's a different mental threat model these days. Back then the internet was this other space apart from real life. There was a cognitive separation between the meat space and virtual worlds. In...
There's a different mental threat model these days. Back then the internet was this other space apart from real life. There was a cognitive separation between the meat space and virtual worlds. In this social media era the internet is a portal to the real world.
The internet has always had bad actors but the internet seems practically oblivious to it anymore. It's not just gen Z. Young people are more naive and more susceptible to influence. The general internet populations seem to have a very hard time ignoring trolls / griefers / inflammatory posters. These sorts of words aren't even in the popular internet vernacular anymore.
That's what I mean. That kind of thing is the normal. For some it's not a troll, it's just how it is. Hence there's no need for words to distinguish aberrations.
That's what I mean. That kind of thing is the normal. For some it's not a troll, it's just how it is. Hence there's no need for words to distinguish aberrations.
I agree, way back when, the threat of the internet came from the possibility of interacting with the real world. You'd agree to meet someone and they'd steal your kidney or kidnap you or whatever....
There was a cognitive separation between the meat space and virtual worlds. In this social media era the internet is a portal to the real world.
I agree, way back when, the threat of the internet came from the possibility of interacting with the real world. You'd agree to meet someone and they'd steal your kidney or kidnap you or whatever. Because you didn't have a huge online profile, the things that could be done to you online were limited. Even the perverts could only like... talk dirty I guess.
Now? Shit someone can ruin your life and not even be on the same continent. Steal banking info, ruin professional and familial relationships, steal and post compromising pictures of you that will remain online forever, literally track your location.
Whenever someone says "it's just the internet, it's not real" nowadays I think "jeez, which decade is that dude living in?". The internet is more real-life than actual real life for a lot of people.
Hmm I think we actually agree. My point was that in the 90s, we generally felt the internet was unsafe and perhaps took better precautions. Now that the internet is ubiquitous I wonder if the...
Hmm I think we actually agree. My point was that in the 90s, we generally felt the internet was unsafe and perhaps took better precautions.
Now that the internet is ubiquitous I wonder if the newer generation never really developed whatever the online equivalent of "street smarts" would be and is thus falling for more scams?
I think this really comes down to younger people having more exposure. Of course a 20-something will get scammed more than my 80-year-old grandmother; she doesn't even have the internet or a cell...
I think this really comes down to younger people having more exposure. Of course a 20-something will get scammed more than my 80-year-old grandmother; she doesn't even have the internet or a cell phone. The means for exposure are vastly reduced compared to someone who is constantly connected and has many social media accounts.
There are a few theories that seem to come up again and again. First, Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology. Second, growing up with the internet gives younger people a familiarity with their devices that can, in some instances, incentivize them to choose convenience over safety. And third, cybersecurity education for school-aged children isn’t doing a great job of talking about online safety in a way that actually clicks with younger people’s lived experiences online.
That last one rings true for me, not that other don't happen but I have been involved in volunteer efforts to teach children about online safety. Most never thought about teaching them about...
That last one rings true for me, not that other don't happen but I have been involved in volunteer efforts to teach children about online safety. Most never thought about teaching them about financial scams, mostly related to don't take pictures of yourself nude, even for your same aged partners as the law can hit both and once it's online it is very hard to get rid of.
I work in Higher Ed IT, and I have personally seen and heard about other reports of student's parents getting upset that we stopped the kid from getting job scammed. "Why would you take this job...
Most never thought about teaching them about financial scams,
I work in Higher Ed IT, and I have personally seen and heard about other reports of student's parents getting upset that we stopped the kid from getting job scammed. "Why would you take this job opportunity away!"
Seriously zero understanding that the job was a scam that we see literally dozens of times a day.
I feel like in general incorporating some sort of "common sense" is necessary, but difficult in the tech world, especially since everything is always constantly changing and laws don't really seem...
I feel like in general incorporating some sort of "common sense" is necessary, but difficult in the tech world, especially since everything is always constantly changing and laws don't really seem to keep up too well with technology's rapid iterations. Obviously there are some core tenants but there really should be better literature or guidelines on it.
It's also definitely worth noting that the article includes cyberbullying in its stats -- I wager that specifically is skewed WAY more towards gen Z than any other generation. I also don't think...
It's also definitely worth noting that the article includes cyberbullying in its stats -- I wager that specifically is skewed WAY more towards gen Z than any other generation.
I also don't think people lend enough credence to them just... being younger. I got scammed in-person for about $70 when I was 19 because I was naive and didn't know how to be forceful and end a conversation when I wasn't comfortable with it. There's definitely a vulnerability just in being younger and less experienced that I think is a big factor in the difference between Millennials and Gen Z (note: I was born in '96, so I'm between the two and don't have a horse in that race).
Is it necessarily a bad thing? If you take any of us and stick us in Victorian London, I'm pretty sure we'd be dead in a matter of hours from lack of street smarts. I think the internet has...
Is it necessarily a bad thing? If you take any of us and stick us in Victorian London, I'm pretty sure we'd be dead in a matter of hours from lack of street smarts. I think the internet has legitimately become much safer, and that has instilled a sense of safety in the generation that grew up with it, just as the crime statistics of today have. For better or for worse (as, everything has a tradeoff), I think the internet will continue to become "safer", to meet the expectations of this newer generation.
The problem is the actual safety isn't keeping up with the feeling of it. Shiny interfaces and a smooth end-user experience are nice, but data breaches (which lead to identity theft, increasing...
The problem is the actual safety isn't keeping up with the feeling of it. Shiny interfaces and a smooth end-user experience are nice, but data breaches (which lead to identity theft, increasing accessibility to scammers and other ne'er-do-wells), phishing, and less common but still present exploits won't ever stop. Sure, today you really won't encounter linkin-park-numb.exe unless you go looking for it, but one key difference the internet has over reality is no one penalizes failed attempts. Meaning, if you go poking around a bank IRL, trying locked back doors and seeing if you can walk into the back rooms someone's going to stop you. No one but an automated lockout or IP ban (easily circumvented) stops bad actors from trying to find out how to successfully compromise websites. They only risk active consequences if they succeed.
Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying. The Deloitte survey shows that Gen Z Americans were three times more likely to get caught up in an online scam than boomers were (16 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Compared to boomers, Gen Z was also twice as likely to have a social media account hacked (17 percent and 8 percent). Fourteen percent of Gen Z-ers surveyed said they’d had their location information misused, more than any other generation. The cost of falling for those scams may also be surging for younger people: Social Catfish’s 2023 report on online scams found that online scam victims under 20 years old lost an estimated $8.2 million in 2017. In 2022, they lost $210 million.
I like to think kids are in general more technologically uneducated - it certainly seems to confirm my own observations - but I have to wonder about the sources used by the article as a basis for...
I like to think kids are in general more technologically uneducated - it certainly seems to confirm my own observations - but I have to wonder about the sources used by the article as a basis for their hypothesizing.
The CYBSAFE report seems fairly professional and is probably the main source, however the survey sample size for Gen Z (285, half of which are americans) is drastically smaller than the ones for Millenials, Gen X and Boomers (810, 798, 964).
The Deloitte report does not seem to provide any conclusions that specifically support the article's premise (that Gen Z falls for more scams than boomers).
The IJCIC article is only comparing Gen Z with "Gen Y" (millenials and late gen X going by the CYBSAFE definition); boomers are not contemplated.
So I'm taking this with a big grain of salt. Going back to the only significantly useful source, the CYBSAFE one, the report's own conclusions state that Gen Z and millennials are the most at risk. I'm not seeing a significant difference between Gen Z and millennials when compared to boomers? And are boomers just not falling for these scams because they do not fundamentally live online the way we do?
The actual report shows on page 14 that the younger you are, the more likely you are to report being a victim of phishing or stolen identity. And for those who think it's a training issue, the...
The actual report shows on page 14 that the younger you are, the more likely you are to report being a victim of phishing or stolen identity.
And for those who think it's a training issue, the report notes that the younger you are, the more training you received on how to avoid phishing scams and secure online accounts.
The report concludes that this means more training isn't the solution. I am not sure I agree. It's hard to tell, as they don't share the exact questionnaire, but it seems possible that more training means you are more likely to correctly identify a phishing attempt or that your identity was stolen.
Yeah, it's a questionable line of reasoning that seems like it would be prone to Simpson's paradox (e.g., men smoke more than women, but women get lung cancer more than men, which can make it look...
Yeah, it's a questionable line of reasoning that seems like it would be prone to Simpson's paradox (e.g., men smoke more than women, but women get lung cancer more than men, which can make it look like smoking prevents lung cancer if you don't control for gender in your data set).
It sounds like if we want to determine whether training helps prevent scams, we need to control for age, since that is clearly a complicating factor here.
This is why critical thinking is so important. Most adults know that there's no such thing as a free lunch and if something is too good to be true it probably is. However, the younger you are the...
This is why critical thinking is so important. Most adults know that there's no such thing as a free lunch and if something is too good to be true it probably is. However, the younger you are the more likely you'll be to try to make some crazy leap about why this offer for "Free Robux!" or "Free Fortnite Skin!" is "legit" ("I wonder if its some really rich guy like Mr Beast just giving them away!")
I also think it has to do with the really young and really old populations being the most vulnerable, kind of like like how the Nigerian Prince scams have poorly spelled words to discourage intelligent people that would look too deeply into it.
This is pretty interesting. It mentions that Millennials and Zoomers are the two "Natively Online" generations, the only two generations that grew up with this technology available from a young age. Millennials are less likely to fall for these scams though.
I wonder if it's more because of our parents. Born in 92, I had access to the internet very early on, but colored through the lens of my parents. They were still very cautious about it.
I also remember Cartoon Network having ads for their website and saying "Get your parents permission to check out CartoonNetwork.com!" and then I actually did it. 'Hey mom, can I go print off Courage the Cowardly dog coloring book pages from the internet?'
They were also very fearful about putting any personal information onto the web. I remember sitting with my mom, birthday money in hand, in cash, and asking her if I could give it to her in exchange for her purchasing something for me off the internet. In the mid 2000's. She was skeptical as hell.
What I'm getting at, is I wonder if parents of Zoomers, being younger themselves, and being better versed in technology and the internet than the older parents of millennials had a more laissez-faire attitude and didn't cultivate a level of skepticism in this younger generation.
Also 92, and I agree for the most part about the cautiousness, but I think there's something else that's often glossed over (though I saw an article posted here a week or two ago with conversation similar to what I'm going to say, anyway), and that's the fact that natively online and natively tech literate are very different things.
We grew up with desktop computers and a need to troubleshoot and fix things ourselves when there were problems. Gen Z grew up mostly with tablets and cell phones where everything "just works" first and foremost. If something horrible happens? All your important stuff is saved to the cloud, just factory reset your phone or tablet.
It feels like very late Gen X and Millennials are the only generation that have an inherent bias towards technological literacy. I've met younger people through RPGs, and even though they have desktops/laptops/whatever, they don't even know how to install an adblocker. I had to walk them through what amounted to a two-step process of "find link, click link."
And obviously this is all generalized, and I assume online demographics of our generation are going to inherently trend towards technological literacy and privacy concerns more than the average person, but my anecdotal evidence is very much that once cell phones and tablets became the norm, there was a significant trend downward.
I think this is a big part of it. I know my experience doesn't generalize but my introduction to computers was very nuts-and-bolts. My dad and I built all our PCs, older PCs got repurposed into servers, MS licenses were limited so Linux was used when a key wasn't available. Which often meant compiling a kernel and doing some medium intensity dev work. We used the server to host all sorts of things, webapps, email, websites, game lobbies etc.
But I don't feel "natively online" really. Things like instagram, snapchat, etc. are lost on me. I'm much more comfortable in Discord or on a website like Tildes.
I wonder what percentage of people who frequent this site regularly use Instagram or Snapchat. Personally I can't stand them... I have also been trying to convince my wife to move away from telegram as they are integrating stories now.
Agreed about the part where today's walled garden mobile platforms are terrible at teaching tech literacy. But I'd also caution against generalizing across our entire generation. We might not notice it much in our day-to-day, but vast swaths of our generation didn't get too involved in tech during their formative years. Sure, maybe they had ICQ on their family computer, but they didn't get burned trying to download .isos from shady websites. They're a bit more literate, probably in the "following straightforward instructions" and "spotting a scam" departments, but I would expect most of the variance to exist within the generations, not across them. That is, the differences in tech literacy have two components: One explained by generations ("boomers and zoomers dum, hur hur") and one not explained by that (you being literate, but your classmates not - for a much more diverse set of reasons than the first ones). I've met very savvy boomers, and within IT (so only looking at people working in tech, duh) I don't think Gen Z is noticably less tech literate.
I meant more in the sense of like (random numbers out of thin air) 20% of millennials vs 5% of gen Z or something like that, rather than anything significant on either end. Just a lot more of one than the other.
I know I've heard a lot of stories from teachers and tech support people about how kids these days are more in line with the retirees than millennials when it comes to tech literacy. I think it makes sense. They've grown up in an era where you basically don't need to ever even install anything. You just tap the "get" button and then a few moments later, you can stream anything you want. You don't need an ability to critically think while troubleshooting. If something doesn't work these days, in 99% of cases the fix is either reboot or wait for an update. There's no need to find a community to discuss something you're interested in. Forums are mostly a thing of the past so you just search for what you want with reddit at the end and you've found a subreddit. Or you just use a hashtag on anything else I guess? They're on Twitter and Instagram and I assume tiktok so you just search for that and now you've found everyone in the world who wants to discuss what you like and that's obviously better than finding a niche community that suits your personality, right?
especially scary because, if they can't figure this out themselves, who's to say you weren't giving them a link to malware & having them install it?
I sort of agree with this too. I'm just about to hit 44 and have been fortunate enough to be able to use a PC since the 80s, getting online around 14ish when the web was still pretty new. Because it was new, not many people were paying much attention, nor were there as many marks as there are now to rob and scam for money or advertise to.
People around my age and up that were using computers got to grow up with the web and as new things were invented we were slowly drip fed scam after scam to the point that we probably have developed good Internet 'street smarts'. A good scam will still get us, but the low-hanging fruit is easy to see coming.
But this felt like a small subset of people. The general population was busy making fun of computer nerds and how weird we were. But things were growing, the body of information available online grew and grew exponentially, along with the tools to help create that technolgy.
Granted my age is probably a factor here, but at 16/17 I had a geocities webpage made from and html 3.0 book I managed to beg my parents to buy me made in notepad and/or ms dos editor (if on the 'older' computer that I'd floppy disk over to the newer computer to upload via modem). I wouldn't have had the slightest idea how to stand up a webserver or even think that you could host it over a modem.
2001, I'm now following guides online and running IIS/Apache and writing ASP pages. My programming info comes from a mix of being in college, books, and internet. The tools are arriving, MS frontpage will get you up and running, a few people know webpages are cool and want one, and that's the tool they use.
I think this is about the time I'd say the average millennial is hitting the same age I got online. Now they are more likely to have a computer in the house, more likely to be able to find information how to do things if they want it, and have tools to ease them in to computing tasks which they can then launch into maybe more sophisticated ones if interested. But, the stuff isn't nice yet, it isn't everywhere. We all don't have a plug into the internet living in our pockets yet, so you still need to learn a thing or too.
And now add another 10 years. Everything JUST WORKS. I know we want to complain about the latest windows this and that but the thing just works, hardware just works when you plug it in, drives update on their own, all your game run without crashing. You want a computing service, there is a website or program that does it for you, just point your browser at it. In 2001 I installed the php gallery software on my IIS server to share photos with my friends that I took off my cool digital camera. Pretty soon we all have dropbox then phones that just put it right on the cloud. When learning docker the tutorial had me stand up a functional webserver with like 1 or 2 commands.
Whatever you want with computers exists already and is made by some dedicated team of people trying to make money off it working 40+ hours a week at getting it better everyday. If you want to learn computers now you would do so because you like it, not cause you have to, and I think thats is where we sit right now.
If I were 14 today, I'd have access to incredible tools and knowledge. Who knows what I could have done with the motivation and energy I had back then. But, I also could have not thought that the internet and computers were real life magic and just as soon went on to do something entirely else too. So the savvy user of today is someone who wants to know it, and is going to know way, way more. But the general sea of people aren't going to be forced to learn like the millennial was, and I really do think that is what accounts for the strange lapse of general computing knowledge we see in the younger generation today.
That's gotta be it. Creating online accounts used to be as easy as picking a username and password. Nowadays a ton of things require name, email, pw, address, phone, date of birth, etc. So I can see how a zoomer who grew up used to inputting their entire set of info online for every little thing naturally becomes more relaxed with their info compared to their millennial counterparts who maybe still hesitate a bit when some random website asks you for your real-life phone number and address.
Well. As a millennial with a step child zoomer who is 18 I don't think it's this. We pounded in the fact that nothing online can be inherently trusted. Don't just buy stuff from unknown websites etc. But none of that stuck. There is an inherent trust most of that generation has with what they see online. Social media means nothing is personal or private so that information is freely given.
There is this zoomer who decided to use my email address for everything he signed up for. I have everything about him except his SSN. I even texted him letting him know what he was doing. Not a care in the world. Just crazy.
Bingo! The expectation of privacy is lost for these kids, and I think a lot of them don't see it as something worthwhile to protect.
And really, who can blame them? Your privacy is bought and sold every day, no matter what you do. It's not like people opt in to Trans Union or Equifax. Credit monitoring happens whether you want it to or not.
I don't think we'll really understand the full impact for a number of years yet.
Not unique to Zoomers, as least accidentally using someone else's e-mail. There's been stories floating around as long as I remember of people using fist.last@gmail even though their real is last44@yahoo as their e-mail and the "real" First Last receives all their bank statements and gas bills. The total indifference, however, may be a modern innovation.
I was born in '85 so I wasn't terribly young when the internet started becoming available around me.
In my experience, a lot of the caution I've learned to exercise has come at the cost of manually fighting viruses I downloaded myself from Kazaa, or a less-than-reputable download site, or whatever other foolish link I could find to click.
I've reinstalled my operating system for a fresh start more times than I care to admit. At one point, I had to download DBAN to fully wipe out a troublesome bug that just wouldn't quit.
Ultimately, I learned how to defend myself not from malicious keyloggers and people trying to sell me "software" for the "virus detected" but from myself. It's just not worth the time and stress trying to fight malware to click on something I'm not (reasonably) sure is safe.
Then again, my parents had me fairly late in their lives so their concept of technology use has always been a little more outdated than other parents'. When my mom wanted to punish me she didn't change passwords or anything, she pulled the phone cable out of the router and hid it.
Its kind of funny, I grew up the same way. My parents similarily cautious, especially with sensitive information. The same dad called me perplexed 20 years later, because he entered his phone number into some obscure crypto maximalist pyramid scheme scam site and was suddenly receiving around 10-20 calls per day from random numbers around the globe, unable to block them.
Some loosely related family member literally believes anything written on the most idiotic blogs. 5g, bill gates vaccecine population control, fake moon landing and healing crystals. It took less than a year to get her fully absorbed into the bizarro world rabbit hole. A person who used to be very skeptical of the web itself.
It appears to me that some part of the skeptical parents are now running blindly into the traps not following their own advice.
I wonder if being around when the internet was more openly "unsafe" has instilled an inherent protective distrust in the pre-Gen Z generation?
Actually, I think the internet is most "unsafe" today.
It probably/partly is because internet got wide spread and today everyone is online. Back then (1998 when I got first connected) only enthusiasts and (PC) knowledgable people got connected. It's easy for the bad guys to get their victim today, even uneducated people or kids can browse web on their phones.
There's a different mental threat model these days. Back then the internet was this other space apart from real life. There was a cognitive separation between the meat space and virtual worlds. In this social media era the internet is a portal to the real world.
The internet has always had bad actors but the internet seems practically oblivious to it anymore. It's not just gen Z. Young people are more naive and more susceptible to influence. The general internet populations seem to have a very hard time ignoring trolls / griefers / inflammatory posters. These sorts of words aren't even in the popular internet vernacular anymore.
I don't know, I think a number of Americans vote on how "troll-ish" their favorite politician is....
That's what I mean. That kind of thing is the normal. For some it's not a troll, it's just how it is. Hence there's no need for words to distinguish aberrations.
I agree, way back when, the threat of the internet came from the possibility of interacting with the real world. You'd agree to meet someone and they'd steal your kidney or kidnap you or whatever. Because you didn't have a huge online profile, the things that could be done to you online were limited. Even the perverts could only like... talk dirty I guess.
Now? Shit someone can ruin your life and not even be on the same continent. Steal banking info, ruin professional and familial relationships, steal and post compromising pictures of you that will remain online forever, literally track your location.
Whenever someone says "it's just the internet, it's not real" nowadays I think "jeez, which decade is that dude living in?". The internet is more real-life than actual real life for a lot of people.
Hmm I think we actually agree. My point was that in the 90s, we generally felt the internet was unsafe and perhaps took better precautions.
Now that the internet is ubiquitous I wonder if the newer generation never really developed whatever the online equivalent of "street smarts" would be and is thus falling for more scams?
I think this really comes down to younger people having more exposure. Of course a 20-something will get scammed more than my 80-year-old grandmother; she doesn't even have the internet or a cell phone. The means for exposure are vastly reduced compared to someone who is constantly connected and has many social media accounts.
This is brought up in the article
That last one rings true for me, not that other don't happen but I have been involved in volunteer efforts to teach children about online safety. Most never thought about teaching them about financial scams, mostly related to don't take pictures of yourself nude, even for your same aged partners as the law can hit both and once it's online it is very hard to get rid of.
I work in Higher Ed IT, and I have personally seen and heard about other reports of student's parents getting upset that we stopped the kid from getting job scammed. "Why would you take this job opportunity away!"
Seriously zero understanding that the job was a scam that we see literally dozens of times a day.
I feel like in general incorporating some sort of "common sense" is necessary, but difficult in the tech world, especially since everything is always constantly changing and laws don't really seem to keep up too well with technology's rapid iterations. Obviously there are some core tenants but there really should be better literature or guidelines on it.
It's also definitely worth noting that the article includes cyberbullying in its stats -- I wager that specifically is skewed WAY more towards gen Z than any other generation.
I also don't think people lend enough credence to them just... being younger. I got scammed in-person for about $70 when I was 19 because I was naive and didn't know how to be forceful and end a conversation when I wasn't comfortable with it. There's definitely a vulnerability just in being younger and less experienced that I think is a big factor in the difference between Millennials and Gen Z (note: I was born in '96, so I'm between the two and don't have a horse in that race).
Woohoo '96 babies high five! It's a weird place to be in because I feel like I'm not exactly a Millennial but my zoomer friends call me old lol
I just embrace it and call myself a Zillennial tbh. There are too many differences from both categories imo.
Is it necessarily a bad thing? If you take any of us and stick us in Victorian London, I'm pretty sure we'd be dead in a matter of hours from lack of street smarts. I think the internet has legitimately become much safer, and that has instilled a sense of safety in the generation that grew up with it, just as the crime statistics of today have. For better or for worse (as, everything has a tradeoff), I think the internet will continue to become "safer", to meet the expectations of this newer generation.
The problem is the actual safety isn't keeping up with the feeling of it. Shiny interfaces and a smooth end-user experience are nice, but data breaches (which lead to identity theft, increasing accessibility to scammers and other ne'er-do-wells), phishing, and less common but still present exploits won't ever stop. Sure, today you really won't encounter linkin-park-numb.exe unless you go looking for it, but one key difference the internet has over reality is no one penalizes failed attempts. Meaning, if you go poking around a bank IRL, trying locked back doors and seeing if you can walk into the back rooms someone's going to stop you. No one but an automated lockout or IP ban (easily circumvented) stops bad actors from trying to find out how to successfully compromise websites. They only risk active consequences if they succeed.
Totally agree with this, but it also happens widely across the board of age demographics. Source: I work IT in a large organization with many gen-Z's.
I like to think kids are in general more technologically uneducated - it certainly seems to confirm my own observations - but I have to wonder about the sources used by the article as a basis for their hypothesizing.
The CYBSAFE report seems fairly professional and is probably the main source, however the survey sample size for Gen Z (285, half of which are americans) is drastically smaller than the ones for Millenials, Gen X and Boomers (810, 798, 964).
The Social Catfish report only includes Facebook users.
The Deloitte report does not seem to provide any conclusions that specifically support the article's premise (that Gen Z falls for more scams than boomers).
The IJCIC article is only comparing Gen Z with "Gen Y" (millenials and late gen X going by the CYBSAFE definition); boomers are not contemplated.
So I'm taking this with a big grain of salt. Going back to the only significantly useful source, the CYBSAFE one, the report's own conclusions state that Gen Z and millennials are the most at risk. I'm not seeing a significant difference between Gen Z and millennials when compared to boomers? And are boomers just not falling for these scams because they do not fundamentally live online the way we do?
The actual report shows on page 14 that the younger you are, the more likely you are to report being a victim of phishing or stolen identity.
And for those who think it's a training issue, the report notes that the younger you are, the more training you received on how to avoid phishing scams and secure online accounts.
The report concludes that this means more training isn't the solution. I am not sure I agree. It's hard to tell, as they don't share the exact questionnaire, but it seems possible that more training means you are more likely to correctly identify a phishing attempt or that your identity was stolen.
Yeah, it's a questionable line of reasoning that seems like it would be prone to Simpson's paradox (e.g., men smoke more than women, but women get lung cancer more than men, which can make it look like smoking prevents lung cancer if you don't control for gender in your data set).
It sounds like if we want to determine whether training helps prevent scams, we need to control for age, since that is clearly a complicating factor here.
TBH, I got the feeling the report was selling something, I just couldn't figure out what.
This is why critical thinking is so important. Most adults know that there's no such thing as a free lunch and if something is too good to be true it probably is. However, the younger you are the more likely you'll be to try to make some crazy leap about why this offer for "Free Robux!" or "Free Fortnite Skin!" is "legit" ("I wonder if its some really rich guy like Mr Beast just giving them away!")
I also think it has to do with the really young and really old populations being the most vulnerable, kind of like like how the Nigerian Prince scams have poorly spelled words to discourage intelligent people that would look too deeply into it.