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Privacy The Internet Cellphones Security Wireless Networking Technology

Millennials Value Speed Over Security, Says Survey (dailydot.com) 143

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Dot: Millennials stand apart from other Americans in preferring faster Internet access to safer Internet access, according to a new survey. When digital-authentication firm SecureAuth asked people from all age groups whether they would rather be safer online or browse faster online, 57 percent of Americans chose security and 43 percent chose speed. But among millennials, the results were almost reversed: 54 percent chose speed over security. Young people are also more willing than the overall population to share sensitive information over public Wi-Fi connections, which are notoriously insecure as they allow anyone on the network to analyze and intercept passing traffic. While a clear majority (57 percent) of Americans told SecureAuth that they transmitted such information over public Wi-Fi, nearly eight in 10 (78 percent) of millennials said they did so. A surprising 44 percent of millennials believe their data is generally safe from hackers, and millennials are more likely than members of other age groups to share account passwords with friends. Americans overall are paying more attention to some aspects of digital security. An October 2015 study by the wireless industry's trade group found that 61 percent of Americans use passwords on their smartphones and 58 percent use them on their tablets, compared to 50 percent and 48 percent, respectively, in 2012. The recent study lines up with a report published on May 24 that found that the elderly use more secure passwords than millennials.
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Millennials Value Speed Over Security, Says Survey

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  • by kheldan ( 1460303 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @04:38PM (#52191011) Journal
    But of course that's obvious. They've also been indoctrinated by 'social media', the media in general, and corporations that sharing everything is normal, and that 'privacy' is something anomalous, and that only people with something to hide want privacy. The real question is: will they live long enough to learn the error of their ways, and even more to the point, will they learn that before they reproduce and pass on their indoctrinated ways to another generation?
    • Millennials don't know what we didn't teach them... maybe Slashdot should write something teaching them what we've learned over the years.

      • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @04:56PM (#52191145)

        Millennials don't know what we didn't teach them... maybe Slashdot should write something teaching them what we've learned over the years.

        Ya, because old people trying to teach young people (who, like, seriously guys, know *everything*) always goes over so well :-)

        Now if they'd just get off my fucking lawn - 'cause I'm trying to mow it ...

      • by Anonymous Coward

        It was faggots like you who decided using social security numbers as identification was a good thing. Don't try to claim any sort of high ground here. Idiot.

        • It was faggots like you who decided using social security numbers as identification was a good thing. Don't try to claim any sort of high ground here. Idiot.

          Can you suggest another mechanism to enable identification of an individual without using a social security number, national identifier, passport number? Someone calling a company, government, etc. and claiming they are the person because they can verbally say three word (John James Doe) is not going to work.

          • by Imrik ( 148191 )

            The problem is that SSN is frequently used as both a username and password.

            • Good point. It is used on a lot of health care an government sites at some point. They should not be allowed to be used for login accounts or passwords.
          • The SSN is a pretty good unique identifier. The problem is assuming that it's a secret, and someone claiming to be John James Doe that also can rattle off John James Doe's SSN must actually be John James Doe.

            • Good point. In the past the computers were much more secure and less connected. Now poor security and more connections have resulted in eroding the security. Hence - there are changes that SSNs can be stolen.
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @04:52PM (#52191111)

      Millennials are only marginally stupider. 57% vs 46% is not a big difference. But it is a stupid poll anyway. Security rarely slows down the internet, because security happens at the endpoints, not during transmission.

    • Today I learned that not having the same experience as an elder means 'stupid'.

      • by kheldan ( 1460303 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @05:28PM (#52191329) Journal
        LOL, no.

        'Inexperienced' = 'Isn't aware of/understand X', 'Gets X explained to them', 'Has an AHA! moment, is grateful for new learning/knowledge'.

        'Stupid' = 'Isn't aware of/understand X', 'Gets X explained to them', 'Gives you a funny look, mocks you, says you are just too old, don't understand how things are today, etc, ignores new knowledge/learning'
        • So you're saying you listened to everything your parents said and never made any mistakes, right?

        • So where in this poll is that distinction made? I'm sure many people aren't aware of the necessity for internet security, particularly those that didn't grow up going through the phase of paranoia about the security of internet shopping in the early days of the net.
          • I'm sure the government could care less what I post about on Facebook

            But everything you post on Facebook is being used to create a profile of you that can be used to predict your every action and track your whereabouts with very high accuracy, don't you even care?

            You're just being paranoid, nobody actually does that!

            That's how that particular discussion usually goes.

            • I'd certainly like to see the sort of Facebook page that contains data enabling anybody to create a profile that can be used to "predict your every action and track your whereabouts with very high accuracy", most that I see are photos of parties, pets, food and sharing cat videos but an example of what you're talking about would really help the discussion. In terms of "predict your every action" that's just plain wrong, particularly when they can't even get targeted advertising remotely close to accurate. A

    • by Shoten ( 260439 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @04:56PM (#52191143)

      The creator of the study is stupider than most millennials, I'd wager.

      Security vs. speed hasn't been a network trade-off for a very, very long time. They may as well have put out a study stating "Millennials Value Speed Over Getting Fucked in the Ass by Rebel Wilson."

      Ah, I hear it now..."But public WiFi is faster, and there's the trade-off!" Oh yeah? What public WiFi would that be? None of the ones I've ever used in the past few years were fast at all, because the same openness that makes them non-private also means that tons of people are sharing the bandwidth.

      • by Imrik ( 148191 )

        Public WiFi is faster than going home and doing things on a secure wired connection.

        • by Rakarra ( 112805 )

          Public WiFi is faster than going home and doing things on a secure wired connection.

          I think the distinction is that Public WiFi is usually not faster, and is often orders of magnitude slower, and worse, more prone to service dropouts than your carrier's 4G.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26, 2016 @05:06PM (#52191219)

      o please, cut the crap. This "millennials are stupid" thing has to stop. They are just younger, therefor have less experience with in how many ways things can go belly up, and as a group they therefor have a rosier picture than older people. That is nothing new. Our generation was, on average, incredibly naive as well. We are the generation that got duped by Microsoft's antics and essentially allowed Microsoft's bad (design) decisions to become defacto standards, even though the signs were very clear. The world still suffers for it.

      Face it, we are ALL far to gullible for our own good when it concerns the high-paced technology and societal changes we are going through. And most of us simply don't learn new things fast enough to know any better while growing older either.

    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @05:17PM (#52191277)

      I'd rather think the train of thought is "Make it fast. Leave the make-it-safe part to me".

    • by swb ( 14022 )

      I'm sure they've also grown up in an environment where every fucking thing has a password and many things have grown more hostile to crappy passwords or not allowing saved passwords.

      Yet at the same time, there's this constant sense that those passwords don't matter, as some other vulnerability in a browser, an operating system or some other link in the chain has rendered those passwords essentially useless. And Snowden, too.

      So maybe they've just gotten to the point where they see through it as some kind of

    • by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @05:41PM (#52191441) Journal

      This is not about millennials vs. non-millennials. This is about younger vs. older, in any era.

      When we're younger, we're more impatient, more reckless, take more risks, etc. Suffering from the consequences of poor choices helps us to make better ones in the future.

    • by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @07:11PM (#52191899)
      The simplest explanation is that they have nothing to secure. That is, they have nothing to lose yet: Savings, Job, Credit, etc.
    • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @08:00PM (#52192103) Homepage

      But of course that's obvious. They've also been indoctrinated by 'social media', the media in general, and corporations that sharing everything is normal, and that 'privacy' is something anomalous, and that only people with something to hide want privacy. The real question is: will they live long enough to learn the error of their ways, and even more to the point, will they learn that before they reproduce and pass on their indoctrinated ways to another generation?

      Not to rain on your parade but privacy is a choice. Not everybody wants it, not everybody needs it. I don't know if you remember JenniCam? From 1996 to 2003 she broadcast pretty much her whole life on the Internet right down to having sex. Not that it was a porn cam or anything, it was just everything and at the height it had 3-4 million viewers daily. Now that's a rather extreme example, but I know at least one that I'd call hyperactive on social media. I think he loves every moment of it. Near as I can tell he's networking well both in the business and pleasure department, yes Zuckerberg probably has a file on him thick enough to give Gestapo multi-orgasms but so far I can't really see any huge negative consequences from it.

      Now I couldn't do it, I'm probably the polar opposite because quite frankly I feel my life is none of your business. And I don't feel a need to keep all the people who aren't there updated on where I am or what I'm doing. Like if I go to a concert, I'll just be at the concert I won't be a damn livestream to everyone else who's not there. It's not that I couldn't post most of it online because it's just boring everyday life same as everyone else but I don't feel like sharing. Which means I don't particularly like it when I'm tagged and checked in and whatnot by other people, but it's a compromise. You say it like privacy is a truth they should learn, I'm thinking it's more of a choice. And as long as the choice isn't being made for me....

  • Are parents not teaching their children about VPN? SlashdotDeals is offering discount VPN packages from several vendors, and that solves the insecure WiFi problems.

    • It's pointless to teach about (rather important) stuff like VPNs if the recipient isn't willing to listen. It's best to teach values rather than technologies since technologies usually follow values. If you value privacy, you do whatever you can or is practical to enhance and protect your privacy.

  • I know this study didn't purport to say "all millennials". So this is directed at just the portion that values speed over security.

    YOU ARE MORONS!

    If you think any of these companies you're putting your trust (and your data) in are your "friend", you've been misled and/or are delusional.

    After you get burned enough by this insane level of trust, you'll (hopefully) come around.

    Until then, the rest of us are just going to sit back and laugh at you...

    • by Anonymous Coward

      If you think any of these companies you're putting your trust (and your data) in are your "friend", you've been misled and/or are delusional.

      Yes, misled by the generations before them. Those who were so braindead as to consider internet security as an afterthought in its design (favoring speed over encryption), that created "the cloud", that insisted on the use of webmail, that favoured proprietary spyware like Flash over open standards (because they were too slow to create a capable open standard), that capitulated to a proprietary desktop OS monopoly and that have run spying programs that exploited all of this. You handed them a fucked up syst

      • by Rakarra ( 112805 )

        If you think any of these companies you're putting your trust (and your data) in are your "friend", you've been misled and/or are delusional.

        Yes, misled by the generations before them. Those who were so braindead as to consider internet security as an afterthought in its design (favoring speed over encryption), that created "the cloud", that insisted on the use of webmail, that favoured proprietary spyware like Flash over open standards (because they were too slow to create a capable open standard), that capitulated to a proprietary desktop OS monopoly and that have run spying programs that exploited all of this. You handed them a fucked up system that you created.

        The problem is, there were always good reasons to do the above.

        Webmail came about for many reasons, one being that it was not tied to a capricious ISP that could cancel your email at time. Move, get another ISP, you don't have to change the address that you used to sign up to web sites. It also worked great for "burner" email addresses so you didn't have to give a service your own personal email. And finally, those webmail services, gmail in particular, have far far better spam filtering and sorting than an

  • Of course they do. "stop and think" is not taught in schools anymore (if it ever was). The only reason my kids aren't getting their PCs owned every 2 months is because they're sitting behind pfsense and the file server is virus scanned daily. I can't even imagine what millenials do when their stuff doesn't work any more.... oh wait, I do:
    "Meh. I'll just buy another one."
    • "stop and think" is not taught in schools anymore (if it ever was).

      It never was. There is no evidence that people were smarter in the past. By most measures, kids are smarter today [wikipedia.org] than ever before. Surveys like TFA are poor measures of dumbness because they are comparing young people to older people who have learned more of life's lessons. A more meaningful comparison would be to compare young people today to how dumb we were when we were young (in my case, pretty dumb).

  • COPPA doesn't work very well... kids need education as to what they can do online, they need to know the rules about oversharing when they get started. They should be shown e-mail and texting to people they already know before they learn to publish. Dr. Spock didn't know about this problem in time to write about it.

    • COPPA doesn't work very well.

      COPPA doesn't apply to millennials. Millennials are people that came of age around the year 2000, so they are adults now. COPPA applies to kids under the age of 13. In much of the English speaking world, a zero is referred to as "naught", so these kids born during the 00 decade are called "naughties".

  • Tell me, every time you wait in line for TSA anal probing, don't you prefer speed over security?

  • What type of Security are you talking about? If the security comes in the form boot locking and signed code at the cost of removing fair use, I'd be against it too.

    • by rocqua ( 4252459 )
      There is also the simple matter of diminishing returns. At 99,99% security, extra security matter a lot less than at 90%.
  • Boiling frogs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ronmon ( 95471 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @04:49PM (#52191095)

    Yes, it really is that simple. They have no reference to the expectation of privacy and freedom. The surveillance state is normal to them.

    • by huge ( 52607 )

      You could also take the opposite spin on this: There is no secure internet access to begin with so why wouldn't you choose faster connection over more secure, but still compromised connection? Use SSL, TLS, SSH and the like where you need to be secure and assume that everything else is compromised. Why would one assume that their ISP is secure? Always assume that somebody is eavesdropping the connection, or running an active MITM against you, and consider if your mitigation actions are sufficient?

      Would I co

    • Or maybe there's the reality that we've always been in some form of surveillance state and that they find the responsibility for safety and security rests with themselves.

      I too would have responded speed to this survey. That doesn't mean I don't value security or privacy, but rather that you make it fast and monitor / attack it all you want. I'll work on making my end secure.

  • They're trying to position this as a generational thing, like the upcoming generation is going to behave some way that's completely different than all previous ones.

    What if it has nothing to do with being a "Millennial"? What if it's just about being young and stupid (or if you prefer, inexperienced)? But I guess that wouldn't play to the gender gap dollar. "Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market..."

  • by QuasiEvil ( 74356 ) on Thursday May 26, 2016 @04:56PM (#52191135)

    [quote]to share sensitive information over public Wi-Fi connections, which are notoriously insecure[/quote]

    I've never understood this whole idea - anything sensitive should be going over an encrypted connection anyway. Who cares if some idiot sitting next to me in the coffee shop can sniff it? He can't make heads or tails of it anyway. In the case of a MITM attack set up in the wireless gateway, the certificate validation / host key / other host validation protocols should fail. Adding a VPN connection adds layers of defence, but something that's highly unnecessary for most individuals and data.

    Otherwise, I'm probably just browsing sites that don't require logins or any other information from me - in which case, again, there's nothing secret or proprietary there and I don't care if I get sniffed.

  • The reason is that the ways that typical security are applied = actually insecure and less effective (for the user).

    Take for example, a very common password requirement at Chase bank: They require that passwords be >8 characters, have a !@#$@# special character, numbers, capital letters, etc.

    And.. if you forget your password, it cannot be reset to the same as any of your last 5 old passwords. Even if the last passwords were reset voluntarily due to forgetting.

    So when I, with already a relativ
    • I learned decades ago that the more vulgar your password is the easier it is to remember. When I worked for an (unnamed) ISP, they decided that it was a Good Idea to make all of our internal passwords (only valid for on-site connections) expire every 60 days, probably because somebody discovered that they could do it and conflated "could" and "should." At one point, my password there was FuC|y0U! Then, I had trouble with it and had to give it to my lead to see if she could make it work. She was quite am
  • ..That didn't get one single comment above 2
  • BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS of dollars to Microsoft because they treasure convenience over security.

    Makes me want to barf.

  • They don't have anything substantial to protect yet. Of course they don't care. When you get older, you've (hopefully) accumulated some financial reserves that need to be protected. If you're still young, you typically won't have too much to protect.

  • Trusting that a network has been built securely is totally different than trusting that no one is [currently] hacking your public wifi. That's just trusting the people around you.

    Once again, this whole focus on digital-needs-to-be-secure-otherwise-it-fails is remarkably inconsistent with the windows in my house being made of glass, my car doors being accessible to any locksmith, and the yellow painted line on the highway that keeps high-speed traffic from colliding with other high-speed traffic -- and pede

  • This survey has Dunning Kruger written all over it. These "millennials" haven't yet run into a situation where lack of security bites them in the ass, therefore there is no problem.

    This is no different than older people who are anti-vaxxers because they don't believe things like Polio or Measles are a threat, only to change their tune once their precious baby dies or is disabled for life by something that could have been trivially avoided. Or the billion other examples of people who don't take basic preca

  • A network will always be able to mess with your data. Trusting in the security of a network is stupid. It used to be a theoretical threat, but now we know that organizations like the NSA sniff everything they get.

    The Internet has taught us that we must always use end-to-end encryption. That's why, unlike the phone network, a big percentage of data is secure. The phone network is one of those networks that are considered to be "secure". In reality it's very likely that most phone calls, and particularly thei

  • Oh the irony of all the "millennials are stupid" comments combined with their penchant for voting for Bernie Sanders.

  • Look, we all know FB and the NSA are tracking us, and it's built in to the code of the apps we use, and even the chipsets on our phones.

    We're not stupid.

    Now give us 100 GB/sec like we can get on almost any US university campus and nobody will get hurt.

  • Millennials are just starting in the workforce so they have much less to lose if they do get compromised. That also means that whatever setback occurs can be quickly recovered. While I can understand why they may not care now about exposure of their content and information today - that isn't to say that will be a constant throughout their lives.

    Ask them the same question in 10 to 20 years and see what they say. If they have significant savings or other holdings that are compromised that took many years

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