Also, 3-year olds do not worry whether they might break something—their parents would fix it.
Older people know that things can go wrong in various ways, but they are not sure how exactly. New scams are being invented every day. If you spend most of your time playing with the technology, you have a good idea about what is dangerous and what is not. If you only use it once in a while, it’s a minefield.
For example, if you notice that you missed a phone call and you call the person back… it can cost you lots of money (if the person is a scammer, setting up a paid service, then automatically calling up thousands of people and hanging up, expecting some of them to call back). When you see the missed call, is this something you consider before calling back? Most old people do not have a sufficiently good model; they are aware that some seemingly innocent things are dangerous, but they do not know which ones exactly.
If you teach a 70 years old person how to use a smartphone, do you also explain to them all possible things that can go wrong? Heck, I am not sure I could even list all the dangers. I rely on being an active online reader, so when a new scam is invented, I will probably read about it before someone tries it on me; hopefully. But that old person is just thrown into a pool with sharks. Same if you teach someone browsing the web. Same if you teach someone shopping online. All the tech is full of scams, and if you get scammed, well it sucks to be you, you should have been more tech savvy.
(Recently, someone impersonated my 70-years old mother on Whatsapp and a few other online messengers. I don’t even know how it is possible to create a Whatsapp account using someone else’s phone number; when I try to create an account, it checks the number by sending me a verification SMS. But apparently it is possible to do somehow, because someone did exactly this; created accounts with my mother’s phone number, and some young woman’s photo; then used them to sell some cars. We have no idea how; my mother only uses her smartphone for calling, and sending/receiving SMS. We just reported the whole thing to the police, and my mother changed her phone number.)
The tech is hostile, but if you keep using it every day, you get used to it, and learn to navigate it. You recognize the most frequent scams, and you get lucky that the more rare ones avoided you.
I suspect that in your WhatsApp case, someone spoofed her phone number so that they received the verification SMS instead. SMS verification is recently considered an unsafe method, which is why there’s been a move towards two factor authentication apps.
I’m not confident though, which only proves your point! I’m a professional software developer who reads about things like this all the time and I only have guesses at what went wrong.
(Recently, someone impersonated my 70-years old mother on Whatsapp and a few other online messengers. I don’t even know how it is possible to create a Whatsapp account using someone else’s phone number; when I try to create an account, it checks the number by sending me a verification SMS.
One way this happens is to use the social graph: One of your relatives or friends writes you: “I made a mistake and now it sent a verification code to your phone, can you please give me the verification code?”
When your 70-year old mother gets such a message from another 70-year old friend she wants to help her friend and thus passes the verification code along. That verification code can then be used to overtake the account and attack further targets.
If each old person has >10 similar contacts you only need 10% to fall for this to overtake more and more accounts.
Thanks, I learned yet another way to scam people. But no such thing happened. My mother understands the concept of SMS, she says this did not happen, and she keeps the old messages on her phone, I checked them. Someone simply made a Whatsapp account with her phone number without her receiving any SMS message. I have no idea how that is possible—but that is exactly my point. (And, as usual, Whatsapp does not have any customer service that we could contact and ask.)
She already changed her number, so unless the same thing happens again, we consider this problem solved. It was just an illustration how difficult to understand things are (even for an IT guy such as me).
Alternative explanation: Your mother did participate in the scam in some way and is too embarrassed to admit it.
(You know your mother better than I do. I’m just saying this might have happened and you might not have considered it.)
Re: 1, I recall this being in dispute or at least oversimplified. If you put children and adults on equal footing (in particular, by giving adults the same amount of time to learn languages that children do—potentially several hours per day!), I would be astonished if children came out ahead.
(Notwithstanding some minor aspects of language which children indeed seem advantaged in learning, like speaking a language without an accent.)
The OP was hypothesizing that a lack of keeping up with tech trends leads to you “falling behind” and eventually reaching a point where it feeling insurmountable to learn new tech things. It is possible that this hypothesis is true, and that young people have such a huge advantage in learning new things that this advantage outweighs their similar lack of background knowledge.
I don’t get that sense though. There are some places where 40 year olds have an advantage over 5 year olds in learning new things. There are other places where 5 year olds have the advantage. Then there’s the question of how wide the gap is between 5 year olds and 40 year olds. Language comes to mind as a place where the gap would be massive, but new tech doesn’t feel like it should have a massive gap. My epistemic status is just musing though.
3-year olds have an easier time learning anything than an adult (eg Languages)
3-year olds don’t have any well-formed “ruts” in thier neural pathways. New UI or workflows often cut across the existing ruts
Also, 3-year olds do not worry whether they might break something—their parents would fix it.
Older people know that things can go wrong in various ways, but they are not sure how exactly. New scams are being invented every day. If you spend most of your time playing with the technology, you have a good idea about what is dangerous and what is not. If you only use it once in a while, it’s a minefield.
For example, if you notice that you missed a phone call and you call the person back… it can cost you lots of money (if the person is a scammer, setting up a paid service, then automatically calling up thousands of people and hanging up, expecting some of them to call back). When you see the missed call, is this something you consider before calling back? Most old people do not have a sufficiently good model; they are aware that some seemingly innocent things are dangerous, but they do not know which ones exactly.
If you teach a 70 years old person how to use a smartphone, do you also explain to them all possible things that can go wrong? Heck, I am not sure I could even list all the dangers. I rely on being an active online reader, so when a new scam is invented, I will probably read about it before someone tries it on me; hopefully. But that old person is just thrown into a pool with sharks. Same if you teach someone browsing the web. Same if you teach someone shopping online. All the tech is full of scams, and if you get scammed, well it sucks to be you, you should have been more tech savvy.
(Recently, someone impersonated my 70-years old mother on Whatsapp and a few other online messengers. I don’t even know how it is possible to create a Whatsapp account using someone else’s phone number; when I try to create an account, it checks the number by sending me a verification SMS. But apparently it is possible to do somehow, because someone did exactly this; created accounts with my mother’s phone number, and some young woman’s photo; then used them to sell some cars. We have no idea how; my mother only uses her smartphone for calling, and sending/receiving SMS. We just reported the whole thing to the police, and my mother changed her phone number.)
The tech is hostile, but if you keep using it every day, you get used to it, and learn to navigate it. You recognize the most frequent scams, and you get lucky that the more rare ones avoided you.
I suspect that in your WhatsApp case, someone spoofed her phone number so that they received the verification SMS instead. SMS verification is recently considered an unsafe method, which is why there’s been a move towards two factor authentication apps.
I’m not confident though, which only proves your point! I’m a professional software developer who reads about things like this all the time and I only have guesses at what went wrong.
One way this happens is to use the social graph: One of your relatives or friends writes you: “I made a mistake and now it sent a verification code to your phone, can you please give me the verification code?”
When your 70-year old mother gets such a message from another 70-year old friend she wants to help her friend and thus passes the verification code along. That verification code can then be used to overtake the account and attack further targets.
If each old person has >10 similar contacts you only need 10% to fall for this to overtake more and more accounts.
Thanks, I learned yet another way to scam people. But no such thing happened. My mother understands the concept of SMS, she says this did not happen, and she keeps the old messages on her phone, I checked them. Someone simply made a Whatsapp account with her phone number without her receiving any SMS message. I have no idea how that is possible—but that is exactly my point. (And, as usual, Whatsapp does not have any customer service that we could contact and ask.)
She already changed her number, so unless the same thing happens again, we consider this problem solved. It was just an illustration how difficult to understand things are (even for an IT guy such as me).
Alternative explanation: Your mother did participate in the scam in some way and is too embarrassed to admit it. (You know your mother better than I do. I’m just saying this might have happened and you might not have considered it.)
Re: 1, I recall this being in dispute or at least oversimplified. If you put children and adults on equal footing (in particular, by giving adults the same amount of time to learn languages that children do—potentially several hours per day!), I would be astonished if children came out ahead.
(Notwithstanding some minor aspects of language which children indeed seem advantaged in learning, like speaking a language without an accent.)
The OP was hypothesizing that a lack of keeping up with tech trends leads to you “falling behind” and eventually reaching a point where it feeling insurmountable to learn new tech things. It is possible that this hypothesis is true, and that young people have such a huge advantage in learning new things that this advantage outweighs their similar lack of background knowledge.
I don’t get that sense though. There are some places where 40 year olds have an advantage over 5 year olds in learning new things. There are other places where 5 year olds have the advantage. Then there’s the question of how wide the gap is between 5 year olds and 40 year olds. Language comes to mind as a place where the gap would be massive, but new tech doesn’t feel like it should have a massive gap. My epistemic status is just musing though.