Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do. The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.::undefined
They never played Runescape and it shows
One does not simply buying gf
genX are the perps. shhhh dont tell anyone. no one knows were here
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“People that are digital natives for the most part, they’re aware of these things,” says Scott Debb, an associate professor of psychology at Norfolk State University who has studied the cybersecurity habits of younger Americans.
In one 2020 study published in the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime, Debb and a team of researchers compared the self-reported online safety behaviors of millennials and Gen Z, the two “digitally native” generations.
But because Gen Z relies on technology more often, on more devices, and in more aspects of their lives, there might just be more opportunities for them to encounter a bogus email or unreliable shop, says Tanneasha Gordon, a principal at Deloitte who leads the company’s data & digital trust business.
Staying safer online could involve switching browsers, enabling different settings in the apps you use, or changing how you store passwords, she noted.
Gordon floated the idea of major social media platforms sending out test phishing emails — the kind that you might get from your employer, as a tool to check your own vulnerabilities — which lead users who fall for the trap toward some educational resources.
But really, Guru says, the key to getting Gen Z better prepared for a world full of online scams might be found in helping younger people understand the systems that incentivize them to exist in the first place.
The original article contains 1,313 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
You mean kids don’t have enough life experience to spot scams at first glance? No way!
Gen Z are 11 to 26, younger when this study was done. Take out the youngest cohort of Gen Z and the oldest cohort of Boomers, then show me the new statistics. This is how you mislead with data.
And people have unirinically said that zoomers don’t need to learn computers and tech because advancements in UI have made that obsolete.
Millennials are probably the best at avoiding scams.
Unfortunately we also have no money to scam anyway.
It’s because of all that avocado toast.
Plot twist: avocado toast is the scam.
Mmmmm scam
More scam, please
Gen Z is also less tech savvy even though they’ve only known devices and screens since they were born so this isn’t surprising.
Even though? I don’t think it’s a correct assumption that “devices” would or should make you tech savvy. Smartphones and tablets makes you less tech savvy I’d say. Proper desktop OS computers is where it’s at.
Fuck desktop OS computers. You can be completely tech illiterate if you use MacOS and Windows only. Hell, even a lot of modern Linux distros are basically “Linux with training wheels.” You want to get really tech literate? Do what I did and use nothing but vanilla Arch for around 3 years, constantly installing new things that broke my install and having to fix it or just reinstall at least once every two months. The greatest teacher isn’t necessity. It’s frustration. The second greatest is the arch linux wiki.
“i use arch btw”
I literally can’t tell if this is supposed to be a serious comment or a shitpost copypasta.
Little bit of both.
They’ve only known devices which were built with such a curated UX that they never tried to troubleshoot problems for themselves. When I was a kid you had to be able to figure out how to edit config files and tweak registry keys to get your PC game to run. These days everything is so smooth and seamless. Oh sure, stuff still breaks. But the computers are pocket sized and run on a locked-down OS, so there’s no point trying to troubleshoot them yourself.
The difference now is that in the olden days when something broke you could fix it if you had enough technical know how. For some reason that doubtless involves money that I do not care to learn, companies have invested a staggering amount of R&D into making fixing anything as close to impossible as they can make it unless you are an authorized service technician.
Pop the hood on a modern car, you can change the wiper fluid and that’s about it. Apple is proud of their walled garden and parts pairing and is considering charging for the privilege of sideloading apps. Most applications nowadays don’t even show crash report data to the user and error messages are getting less and less descriptive for fear of being confusing. The only thing you can really pop the hood on nowadays is webpages, and even then you’ll often have to do at least an hour’s worth of reverse engineering to get anywhere useful.
That’s not the result of advancement, it’s the result of obfuscation. It’s a deliberate trend among companies to make us powerless to manage our own devices. They absolutely could make them in a way that is simple enough for an end-user to understand if they really wanted to.
Regardless of what caused it, the fact remains that people stopped learning how to fix their own crap because there’s hardly anywhere they can apply those skills.
I’m in a particularly techy subset of gen Z. Every electronic device I own is either jailbroken or running a different operating system than the one it shipped with. I use Linux exclusively which is a fancy way of saying I’m used to having to fix things when they break without any instructions on how to do that. I have trouble with tech meant for normies. They hide so much complexity it makes them impossible to troubleshoot. How can I expect people who were raised on tech meant to be seamlesa to mend the inevitable seams when I don’t know how?
It’s not their fault, is what I’m saying. I agree that interfaces nowadays are too user friendly.
wish i could say i’m surprised. i’m gen z myself and i’d say i’m pretty decent with not being an idiot with technology. i do the usual stuff like running firefox + uBlockOrigin and i’m also a linux user. anyways, people at my school are just… so dumb with technology. a bunch of people have lost permission to use their school chromebooks and a computer at school because they got malware on it. either by going to a pirate site or just clicking a random download button (my school doesn’t allow us to use adblockers). not to mention that most of them believe that macs cannot get malware. so yeah, i’m unfortunately not surprised with this
(my school doesn’t allow us to use adblockers)
wtf why
Because you can potentially install other extensions, chrome and edge will suck with uBO soon anyway, and you cant install exe’s or chocolatey, too restricted.
i really wish i knew
I thank getting into pcgaming for pushing me towards tech literacy. With how simplified tech has gotten and most usage being phones it’s not surprising so many are more clueless than boomers who were at least forced to use PCs in an office setting.
that’s similar to what happened to me. i wanted to make a ROM hack for super mario world. fast forward 3 years later and im now using a jailbroken iphone and dual booting win10 and fedora
Getting malware on a chromebook is hard. How did they manage that. I thought it was even more locked down than ios?
i’m honestly not sure. i should probably ask the school IT guy because he had to ban a few people from using chromebooks. we are allowed to download things so that’s probably it though.
Same here, people look at me like an alien when I say that I use an android (no root anything) or a jailbroken iPhone. I’ve met people that don’t even understand the concept of a folder…
Why do we have names for generations? Stupid.
Yeah, it’s become the new sports teams. Everyone loves blaming their problems on whatever generation they least identify with, when realistically there’s no fair way to judge an entire generation and no fair way to compare groups with such large age gaps and wildly different experiences growing up.
I think they’re way more used to just giving information away without thinking about it. “They have everything already, why fight it” just plays into the hands of scammers.
I disagree partially with this article. While not every gen z tech consumer is a Linux user. Not all of them fall for scams. It’s rather, the people who are so invested in certain franchise like Fortnight, and trying to get free robux or vbucks. Or trying to get free gift cards to get free curency to buy games on console storefronts. There a some that are gen z the do exersize common sense. Being a gen z myself, I would say I am one of those that do exersize common sense guarding form scams.
Not to mention some of Gen Z is still only around 12 years old.
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.
Teenagers are bad at risk assessment…
This shouldn’t shock anyone, but it makes boomers feel good about themselves and their lead addled brains can’t handle the critical thinking to understand why this isn’t the win they think it’s is…
No way it went up 20x in 5yrs? There must be something weird with the data
King of obvious really by the sheer volume of manosphere, crypto, etc grift content out there.
They can’t use computers! Sorry to generalise, but I was called a genius for using the task manager and just basic Word formatting. The thing is, we do have our 10,000 hours, maybe I am the equivalent of a chess grandmaster in Word. It’s just jarring to hear from a university student.
I had a work colleague who had a spreadsheet with one column calculating something to do with a particular date. They didn’t have any formulas at all. For any calculations. They would go in each day and manually calculate and then type in the values. In every cell.
I put in an input cell date, and simplest of formulas in 3 cells, and they looked at me like I was some kind of wizard.
I returned to my desk, put my head in my hands in sheer shock. I still don’t understand what they thought a spreadsheet was for…It made.nice columns?
Anyways, when I recovered, I finished my resignation letter,.and that was the best thing I ever did in that particular cesspool 😁
I think that generalization is acceptable.
Most avoid computers. My parents use’em and click everything they come across with. Decade ago I installed Linux in their shitty old computer, just so I can remove everything they can use to screw up the OS.
Everything was fine for few years till my father bought a new shitty low end computer from the black friday with all kinds of support and additional warranty BS that needed Windows with VNC that they really didn’t understand.
So, the result of that study is BS. One reason is that people selling old people expensive shit they don’t need is not considered a scam.
Boomer mother using Samsung flagship device to use WhatsApp and literally nothing else? That contract is absolutely a scam.
80yo grandma with a ultrafast 5G data plan bigger than mine. And her daily phone is a Doro that doesn’t even do text messages.
Late Gen X to early Millennial was the sweet spot between needing to know how a computer works and having a computer that just works. People before and after don’t have that experience.
As a gen z, I agree-- I once used a terminal in front of one of my friends and he (unironically) asked if I was programming it myself.
Same here, I have the nickname “hacker” at school just because I use an android and am tech savy. I have seen people that didn’t know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking the school or smth when I updated some stuff in termux.
That’s wild to me that people consider using an android device to be technical in anyway. It’s literally designed to be user friendly enough for grandmas and grandpas to use. iPhones have really rotted some people’s brains.
It’s them blue message bubbles causing weird things to their brains.
From what I can see, it’s because “screens” got so much easier to use there’s been no need for countless nights of screaming at the laptop until you figure something out. I mean, it was not easy becoming fluent.
I am scared to see what will happen when iPad kids grow up and something doesn’t work, their understanding of an app is an icon with a label that you click so it opens. No troubleshooting skills whatsoever, even googling a problem isn’t an option for them.
I mean, there was that one time that I tried alpine linux w/sway and then spent ~30 minutes connecting to my friends wifi (this was when he asked if I was programming it myself).
Right, Linux printer drivers. I am the only person on the internet that solved the issue, as far as I can tell.
