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.
I deal with a lot of kids fresh out of college. The surprising part is how many don’t know what Windows File Explorer even is, much less file manipulation. Everything is saved to the desktop.
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Oh yeah. When you ask people to check their downloads folder, and they open up chrome “because that’s where my downloads are”. FML.
What’s funny is that the generation(s) that get computers understand things like the file explorer, the desktop, etc. But, they’re mostly too old to get the metaphors those are based on.
I especially think the “Desktop” metaphor is interesting. Because until laptops became common, people’s computers rested on desks. The main use for a desk in a business setting was a surface for your computer keyboard and monitor. But, the “Desktop” metaphor referenced a previous world where desktop computers didn’t exist, and the main point of a desktop surface was for writing and organizing papers.
So, there’s this tiny overlap in time where the metaphor made sense.
Like, from the 1700s to 1980s if you took a businessman and said “imagine you’re sitting at a desk in an office, what are things you’d find on that desk?” They’d talk about things like, pens, pencils, folders, documents, maybe a desktop calendar. But, you take a businessman from 1995 onwards and ask the same question they’d say things like a computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc. The computer desktop is basically a time capsule of the time before desktops had computer equipment on them. All the metaphors are paper and paper-related things, which are no longer in much use because they’ve been replaced by a computer.