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How to teach my mom the danger of the internet.
Casually Hardcore
Once an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered User regular
Once an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered User regular
So my mom is a seventy years old woman who recently learned how to use a computer and gotten a Facebook account. She just informed me about a 'friend' she met on Facebook and is rather smitten by him.
Now, this may be a different time from when I started using the net in the nineties, but a shit ton of bells and alarms is going off in my head. So I tried explaining to her that everyone you meet on the internet can potentially be liars and that she should be very careful about giving out information to people. She doesn't seem to comprehend the importance of my advice, thinking that she's safe cause this guy is supposedly very far away.
Does anyone have any advice on this? I'm gonna show her the movie 'catfish', but there has to be something else that communicates what I need her to understand.
Now, this may be a different time from when I started using the net in the nineties, but a shit ton of bells and alarms is going off in my head. So I tried explaining to her that everyone you meet on the internet can potentially be liars and that she should be very careful about giving out information to people. She doesn't seem to comprehend the importance of my advice, thinking that she's safe cause this guy is supposedly very far away.
Does anyone have any advice on this? I'm gonna show her the movie 'catfish', but there has to be something else that communicates what I need her to understand.
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PSN:Furlion
My grandparents are afraid of the internet because "identity theft".
You might point out that a person does not have to be nearby to steal her identity.
You can try using the parallel of "pretend anything you are telling this person is being broadcast on national television". Not a 1-to-1 comparison for sure, but it might help her understand the level of caution she should have.
"Anything you say online is the same as posting it on a billboard in Detroit."
Never assume this. My mother posted our old home address on her publicly accessible Facebook page with me tagged to verify it was correct.
The cynic in me says that she may be falling for a romance scam. We see this all the time at work since we do money transmitting through MoneyGram. A person will come in (usually men, but sometimes women) who have fallen in love with someone online, and eventually comes the request for money. This could be "my son is/I am in jail and I can't afford bail" all the way to "I want to meet you but I can't afford a plane ticket." They wire the money, and any number of excuses get made up, if the person even talks to their victim again after that. Either way, the money is gone forever.
Thing is, you can't brow beat her either. Most of these people being scammed have no idea it is happening, and assume that they are too smart for it to happen to them. But we can all find ourselves in the situation where we are being conned. The best thing you can do is keep communication open with her about this guy, and discuss any possible issues like this with her before it is too late.
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You might look up news stories about people being scammed online, share Shadowfire's link, that kind of thing
I didn't mean to suggest that he tells her these things and then assumes everything is completely okay. I think it's clear and obvious that she's having trouble grasping the breadth of danger in this situation - I meant more "I'd make sure you've gone over the basics with her thoroughly". You can only do so much of course, and hope for the best.
I find the most common attitudes are either extreme trust, like OP's mother, or extreme distrust, like the stereotypical old man who doesn't trust the newfangled gizmos.
Obviously those of us who grew up with the Internet, especially those on this forum, are savvy enough (for the most part) to navigate the Internet and enjoy its benefits without falling victim to its dangers, but when you have used the Internet every single day for ten or fifteen years, it is easy to forget how scary OR tempting it can be.
Ask her if she'd trust a stranger with her purse, her bank account, her children. Tell her the internet is just like that, full of people you can trust, but with lots you can't, the difference being you can't look at them, you don't know who they are, they could pretend to be someone else.
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"The power of the weirdness compels me."
It's very unlikely he means physical harm to your mother, but he probably means harm to her bank account. Older people are oddly trusting. Part of this is because their minds are not as sharp as they used to be - even if they are not even remotely senile, one's mind loses a little edge as one gets older. Part of it is because they come from a time when people lived more "locally" and the threat of loss of good name was enough to keep most people honest - so it was safe enough to take someone at their word, because if they were exposed as liars, their community would shun them. This of course does not happen on the internet.
I think it would be best to collect some stories of lonely hearts scammers with your mother and read them with her. She might be a bit hostile due to feeling foolish and say something like "But Andre is not like that! His English is not good because he is French! We are going to meet in Paris next year!" but the seeds of doubt sewn in her mind will get her to notice holes in his story, or requests for money, and sooner rather than later you will ask her about him and she will look shifty and say "We couldn't make it work long-distance" or something similarly face-saving. No-one wants to admit to their kids they were wrong.
Google "lonely hearts scam" for ammo. Use real-life examples. There are plenty of them and it will be more convincing than a movie.
http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/03/15649600-why-older-people-fall-for-scams-its-all-in-the-brain
I don't know about this research though, since as someone mentioned above, a lot of older people seem to go to the opposite extreme where everybody in the world is plotting to steal their identity/swindle them out of their life savings/murder them.
Maybe that group just watches too much shitty local news.
Yup, that's what it seems like to me too.
Especially if she's advertising she's new to computers on facebook.
If you know her password or whatever, you can change it on your end and do some 'malicious' things to her Facebook. Tell her she was too trusting with her information and she "got hacked". You then tell her some of the basics of internet security, maybe have her go to a class at the learning annex or something. I've gone so far as to rename Internet Explorer on my mom's computer to something stupid like "My Videos" and changed the icon for Firefox to that of IE and changed its name to IE, set noscript to whitelist only the websites I know she uses and locked addons. Since then (about 2 years) she's had no issues, whereas before that she had all kinds of goofy shit happen to her computer (a worm or whatever that changes every image you see to porn ads? That's a thing.).
There's a Jewish community center nearby where I live that has computer classes for old folks about once a month, but I have no experience with how it is. Maybe your area has something similar your mom would be amenable to attending?
Start with basics of internet security. Show her the news stories of people who were too trusting. But man, don't hack your mom's account to scare her.
The internet is a wonderful thing, and people shouldn't be scared to use it, even though they should be aware of the potential dangers.
If she doesn't have a senior center or a community center, check the websites of any near by libraries. Most of them offer beginner computer classes.
Quite often it is both at once - they are paranoid about those who are trying to help them/social bogeymen ("I can't find my keys - gypsies must have taken them!" "My son wants to kick me out of my house so he can have it!") and sweetly trusting about those they should not be ("Someone called and guess what - I won a vacation!" "I let my gardener manage my checkbook since my eyesight got bad.")
Sometimes people justify conmen by saying that if you fall for such an obvious scam, then you deserve to lose your money. But this is rotten, as the scams are not aimed at people in perfect command of their faculties. They are aimed at taking the life-savings of the old. And we will all be old one day, and our minds will not be as sharp.
I think I've had the most success in getting across the right message by giving them an example of a situation and/or technology that they're more familiar with (most people are telephone-savvy, for example) and asking them if they would approach the situation in the same way. The advice from LouieP's Mummy is spot on, in my experience.
I just had to give up on Windows with them for instance. Not that nix and OSX are perfect, but they are less targeted at the moment.
My step dad loves online casinos, and will click around and play lots of them. He doesn't seem to have any concept that the various sites he has found or been linked can be filled with who knows what running on his system. They are all overloaded flash/java crap sites.
My mom has gotten better, but she will still often open unknown attachments from friends because "they are a friend, and if they sent it it should be good right?".
In short, it may be impossible to really get some people to "get" what can go wrong online and treat it accordingly.