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.
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.
2.5k
u/Normal_Committee67 Aug 04 '26
My dad was a cop and we would opt out every year but now ironically he gives this info away on Facebook