Anyone can get scammed online, including the generation of Americans that grew up with the internet.
If you’re part of Generation Z — that is, born sometime between the late 1990s and early 2010s — you or one of your friends may have been the target or victim of an online scam. In fact, according to a recent Deloitte survey, members of Gen Z fall for these scams and get hacked far more frequently than their grandparents do.
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.
When millennials were kids, the adults were so fascinated with their aptitude for messing with obscure DOS settings to get their games to run or programming VCRs, that the media did the tech whiz kid trope constantly (e.g. Star Trek, SeaQuest, Hackers, etc, etc). Having to deal with early electronics with arcane interfaces and fickle behavior forced them to have a comprehensive understanding.
The generation that grew up with more point and click experiences did not inspire that same “holy crap, the kids understand this really hard to use technology” and the trope in media died out. They were not forced to understand the workings of the technology to enjoy it.
Similar for cars, people who owned cars in early days pretty much had to understand the nitty gritty, because they’d screw up so often and on the road with little recourse to call for help. Nowadays people largely don’t know how their cars work, because they are more reliable and even if they have a problem on the road, they have a phone in their pocket to get professional help immediately.
I think you overestimate the rate of people who actually dealed with these issues. Rural car owners probably knew a lot how to do themselves, but many people still ran to the repair shop for small things (Source: my dad was a car mechanic in the 80s). In the same wake, how many kids do you think really had computers and messed around with them at the time? If half the kids in the 90s were computer nerds, nerds wouldnt have gotten bullied so much. Also the amount of millenials that i have to show around basic computer stuff at work is staggering.
So all in all we overhype the prevalence of certain lifestyles because they are overrepresented in media and stories of people in our own bubble.
I think they may have been referring to back when cars were a new technology, like in the first half of the 20th century
I think you’re wrong about the car example. The reason people don’t know how their car works now is because so much of it involves proprietary software that you cannot fix it with physical labor. You have to understand and debug the code as well. Additionally, the manufacturers and dealerships have made accessing the parts (both on the car and replacements) so difficult that there isn’t really a universal approach to fixing the modern passenger vehicle anymore. Millenials didn’t stop fixing cars themselves out of laziness, it was because the knowledge needed to do so was greater than the cost of having a professional do it and have the repair guaranteed.
Meanwhile, though I understand that touch screen and app-based OSes are pretty difficult to program for the average consumer, it’s not the only option for computing, just a popular one. This also has nothing to do with whether what you’re downloading is safe.
Never had to debug a car I didn’t modify (and I’ve been modifying them for 40 years now).
Yea, when we add-on fuel injection or bigger turbos we alter the ECU. But daily drivers just don’t need debugging. Their failures are still mechanical systems (or sensors, which the computer then just uses defaults).
Automotive computers are some of the most rigorously tested tech out there. Even my 1974 Bendix analog fuel injection system has never “failed”. Components have, which then puts the system in fail-safe mode, like all automotive computers.
All the automation BS is another matter, which is why I refuse to own a car with that garbage. Like Tesla (or Mercedes and now upper-end of many brands). It’s simply not tested sufficiently, and I’m guessing it’s just not regulated like the “traditional” systems are.