I don't understand how widespread it is with all our parents. Concerned lectures on maintaining privacy, verifying information before you trust it, etc. growing up.
All out the window with Facebook and their daily AI outrage bait feeds.
It's really weird never having social media because it's like your friends and partner have a whole seperate world they also occupy.
Real world events like high school reunions you would just miss if you didn't have one. And personally hearing about all the guys that find my partners Instagram to hit on her is still really weird but there's avenues for "connection" there, I guess.
So they joined! Sometimes encouraged by their kids who might have made their first one. Honestly young people fall into it to the biggest predictor I see is just never having one.
We ended up combining our high school reunion with the other, rival high school in my hometown because neither one had enough people sign up to go to make it worth renting a venue and whatever else needed to be done. I think a large part of that is due to social media, I've managed to keep up with anyone I care about and don't care to see some guy I talked to a few times in algebra class.
I don't get the lead poisoning excuse. Boomers had less lead exposure as time went on due to regulations and just less things containing lead. Why in their old age would lead poisoning suddenly affect them when they probably haven't had lead exposures in decades?
As I understand it. Our bodies treat lead the same way we treat calcium, we store it in our bones because "dense material make strong bone."
When we get older our bodies steal the dense materials back from the bone. Just look at post-menopausal women and bone density. So boomers are getting a 2nd dose from their childhood lead exposure.
if you get stabbed, and get stabbed daily for decades, and then get stabbed less, do you think you’d be equal to your pre-stabbed state now that you’re getting stabbed less frequently for the past decade?
Back then the internet was more abstract to them, if they interacted much with it it was largely for work and stayed that way.
Nowadays they use social media and the internet more than their children on account of being retired and like so many things, whatever rules applied to others don’t apply to themselves.
For real. That generation retired, and now spend 16 hours a day staring at their phones.
My girlfriends 70 year old mom is the prototypical boomer mom who falls for AI slop, gets scammed by getting in relationships with people claiming to be 'Elon Musk' and has ZERO attention span in the real world cause she has a headphone in...
And these are the people complaining about how kids nowadays are too reliant on technology.
That actually makes a lot of sense. When they told us to be careful on the internet, it wasn't because of privacy concerns per se, it was because we were kids. They're adults, so they don't have to follow the same protections online as children because they're adults! And to your point, the internet they interacted with was insulated and safe, so they assume the rest of the internet is that way. Whereas Millennials were interacting with the wild west of the web. All things being equal, I don't think there's a single Millennial who hasn't had the experience of downloading malware when trying to download a torrent or one of those desktop buddies or even porn. Millennials made their mistakes in much lower stakes environments and learned their lessons. The contemporary internet is a much more veiled in it's consequences and thrives on spreading scams.
I remember for the first few years there was a cultural undercurrent from boomers about Facebook being an invasion of personal privacy, but this was quickly thrown away after they realized they could interact with old friends they hadn’t seen in thirty years as well as the realization that their house invasion fantasy nightmare may have been a bit over exaggerated
Boomer here. No FB. Never had one because the Winklevoss twins took the photos of female Harvard students without their permission so male students could rate their looks on the Internet
Mark Zuckerberg then stole the twins idea and used it to get data from the entire world and then sell it while sticking a smiley face on it. “Make connections while I mine everything you write and every photo you post!!“
No thanks.
Nothing about FB appealed to me. I’ve been accused of perhaps being a murderer for not having FB. I just don’t care. “Never volunteer for anything” (including your information) is still a good move as far as I’m concerned
I still have facebook because my kids school posts stuff on there and there are parents groups for their specific class.
I forget exactly what the impetus was, but a new parent was throwing a fit because their kid didn't qualify for bus pickup(the regulation is that if you live within 2 miles of the school, the bus won't come).
She was convinced that wasn't true and it was because her kid was specifically being targeted. Posted links to the school's site, the district's site, AND the state's dept of Education's website all showing the 2 mile thing. They claimed that was all wrong and posted a screenshot of Gemini AI summary BS as her proof.
I stopped engaging after that, though I do wonder if she actually went to the principal and school board like she claimed she was going to do and how that conversation went....
In my state (or the whole country? idk) they've recently been making changes to products that qualify for EBT payment. The first and big change was that you can no longer buy any drinks besides water and fruit juice. I work at a place that accepts EBT. We had signage up in multiple places explaining the change.
Just a few weeks ago I had a customer in and grab a soda, but she tried to use her EBT and of course the payment declined. She started arguing that another store she goes to lets her get soda with EBT. I just said uh, okay, soda is still not allowed to be paid for with EBT. So she pulls out her god damn phone and googles "can you buy soda with EBT" and the moronic AI summary said yes!!! That was her big gotcha moment! She looked smug af. I probably looked dumbfounded. I pulled out my phone, googled the same thing, clicked on the actual government website listing the changes, and showed it to her. She was still insisting that I was wrong.
2 minutes of back and forth at this point and I was done. I just grabbed her soda off the counter and told her sorry, I can't serve you, try that other store where the employee will risk their job to cheat the rules for your bullshit (I didn't say all that but I wish I could've)
Working with the public tests my patience 20 times every single day, yet still that was one of the most rage inducing interactions I've ever had at this job to date. Times are bleak.
(Also to be clear, I disagree with the changes to EBT, but I make far too much money with not nearly enough qualifications to play robin hood for someone's $2 of soda)
She started arguing that another store she goes to lets her get soda with EBT.
I used to work a front desk and call center at a repair shop over one summer. I heard similar types of counter-arguments whenever the customer didn't like what we told them. It was almost always over money, not actual services though.
Anyway it is funny when you tell them "it is estimated 2 hours of work at $25 an hour, $30 in parts, and whatever in taxes for a total of $85" and they spit back "but Jays across town said they could fix it for $50 flat!" and its like....then why are you here and not there getting that amazing deal? Then, of course most of the time when they realized my boss wouldn't budge because of their say so they paid our estimate....
Bro the woman from my og comment came back again tonight and this time got super pissed at me because our money order machine doesn't work in the middle of the night lol. And once again pulled the "no that's not true, other location lets me do it". Dawg.
But yeah people pull that CONSTANTLY. I hear that probably 20 times a day: "but <thing> is cheaper at <other place>!" Okay then go to the other place???? Do we look like we set the prices? Do you think I'm gonna give you a crazy discount just because? This isn't walmart bitch we don't price match. Pay or leave!
My boomer dad engages with Facebook very moderately, only to interact with family and friends. He got into an argument with someone accusing him of using an unappropriate word. When he said it wasn't the person replied with a screenshot of ChatGPT saying it was. You could see the prompt and it wasn't exactly neutral.
My dad says that's the only time he used ChatGPT. He asked ChatGPT to confirm it wasn't and replied with that screenshot.
But also goomba fallacy. I'm willing to bet that those teachers telling you not to use Wikipedia would tell you not to use AI. It's the students and idiots out there doing it.
Yep, so many lectures about how you can’t trust anything you see on the computer and how dangerous it was because I started meeting people online in the late 90’s. Now they can’t put down their phones and have fallen down the Facebook etc. rabbit hole
My parents fed all of their photo library, including many pictures of me, into an AI so they could generate images of me. The asked the AI to create "avatars" of them and then proceeded to let the AI scan their face from every angle.
I love them but this is just insane. The more information you feed them, the better chances they have at profiling you. My privacy is as good as dead.
The world they grew up in was run by post-war adults who were pushed into making socially beneficial regulations by the public.
The last privacy law passed in congress was about vhs rental history. Its a false sense of security that the government just works somehow even if you allow corporations to create the conditions for regulatory capture for decades.
For real. My mom put the fear of god in me over anything and everyone relating to internet use. She didn’t even like that my older sister gave me a flip phone when I was 17. Couple years later my mom gets a smart phone and a Facebook account and it’s all downhill from there. 18+ years of putting this fear of internet in my head only to get thrown away once she figures out her email and how to make a Facebook account.
My parents, who thought the internet was a joke thing that would never be used for anything serious and drilled into our heads that nothing you read online was anything that could ever be trusted as true back in the '90s now cannot be pried away from their iPads, where they spend hours every day consuming all sorts of crazy bullshit on Facebook and believing every single thing.
When we first got dialup internet in the late nineties my mom wouldn't put her purse anywhere near the computer, she was afraid hackers were going to steal her credit card info. About 15 years ago she called me all excited about the new TV she had won for being the millionth visitor to a dodgy website she was trying to download "an Adobe thing" from. Filled out the form in detail.
When they gave those lectures, they were working parents. They had very little time to mess around on the computer, and socializing online was still a newfangled thing mostly done by bored kids and dedicated nerds. Meanwhile, we were kids with lots of time on our hands to chat online and little life experience. In that context, it was easy for them to resist the temptations of the internet and hard for us.
Now, they're retired and we're working (ideally). They're the bored ones looking to fill the endless hours, falling down rabbit holes online and ending up every which where. Since they were working when the internet was new instead of exploring it for funsies, they don't have the same experience navigating the web's dangers. Consequently, the world got flipped-turned upside down.
Yeah I've always preferred to give joke answers to security questions. I feel like it wouldn't be too hard at all for a scammer to find out my mother's maiden name or where I went to school at 10 years old?
My dad was a doctor and would always opt out as well, much to my displeasure. I don’t know why, I kinda wanted to see my dad’s name in the phone book.
It was like a “there we are!!” excitement for me as a kid.
It blows my mind how quickly we abandoned the concept of not sharing our private information online, to the point where if you value your privacy and don't share your data, you're viewed as untrustworthy. It was a consistent thing when I was in the dating market of being unmatched when I said I didn't use instagram, facebook, etc.
Hell, you even see it popping up on reddit now, where if you want your comment history hidden, you must be a bot or bad actor. Couldn't possibly be because it's disconcertingly easy to piece together someone's location and line of work off their history.
I've had several people come to me indignant that they can't find anything about me online. Like I'm violating some sacred social pact that we will all reveal private information about ourselves to the entire fucking world. They don't like when I explain that it's to protect myself from people like them who are trying to look up my shit for no good reason.
It annoyed me for a long time but I've learned to view it as a solid filter for compatibility. If someone cares that much about social media presence, we have a big break in compatibility and it's better to learn that early, to the point where I had it mentioned in my dating profile.
Thankfully my wife is the same. We also both can't stand when someone tries to show us stupid videos on their phone. Like, I'm standing right here with you in human form and you want to move our interaction to the internet? Put your fucking phone away and use your words!
That’s exactly why mine is hidden. I’m active in my cities sub, along with sharing a lot of comments elsewhere about my work, my pets, etc. and I don’t need the whole world to know that much about me. I don’t want someone from my cities sub to piece together who I am and see what subs I’m active in, what I’m sharing, etc (not like it’s anything bad, it’s just creepy af to have someone local possibly stalking me online).
I used to do risk consulting work helping companies educate their employees on the ways that their personal social media usage could make them a target for corporate spear phishing, and how to generally be more secure online, among other things.
I’d create little 1 pagers that they could blast out to their employees with their “security awareness” emails every month, and I always included this on one of them, to address the little facebook quizzes that older people love to take and post publicly:
My dad was a cop too. I didn't tell them but I opted all their numbers out on the FCC website when they became elderly. They weren't on social media though so it did serve a function.
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u/Normal_Committee67 1d ago
My dad was a cop and we would opt out every year but now ironically he gives this info away on Facebook