I asked a relative to look for RealVNC on the Play Store and install it. Once they were done, I asked them to fulfill a basic task inside RealVNC and they were really confused by my instructions. I took a look at their phone, lo and behold, they had installed a different app. I asked them to repeat the install procedure while I watched. They punched in “realvnc” in the search box, two identically formatted results appeared. Their finger instinctively clicked the Install button on the top result. It was an ad. 🤦♂️🤦♀️🤦
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Pffft, the young generation, not hardened by the 6 different download buttons on a torrent search engine… /s
This, but unironically. How can you be so blind to click on something called Zoho, when RealVNC (the thing you searched for) is right below it?
Google play shouldn’t confuse users just because some company pays more for ads
Google being evil and assholes doesn’t remove the fact that this person literally didn’t spend a second to check what they clicked.
Digital safety starts with everyone, despite if we need laws to regulate the asshole companies trying to mess with people’s lack of attention.
They didn’t click anything. This is just a post about the annoyance of ads.
They clicked the install button of an ad, that’s the whole point, what a weird specific detail to get hung up on anyway even if you were not wrong (which you are). It’s not just an annoying ad, it’s an ad hidden as actual results of a search with an identical install button. Google is to blame for that style to clearly try and cheat people and they deserve all the backlash and fines and more for it. But clicking a button that says install without checking what it belongs to is beyond ignoring any basic security, it’s simply stupid, and that’s on the user, not on google.
Clearly many of the commenters here have not supported average smartphone users enough to know how they will blindly click the first thing that looks anything like what they think the technician is asking them to click. Remember, the average person does not have a laptop or desktop computer, they only have a phone (and only the one because they probably traded their old phone in with the carrier for a pittance when they got their current one), and they often do not have internet service at home and simply rely on mobile data from their unlimited data plan.
Is that really the average user? Especially not having internet service at home? I can reluctantly but relatively easily believe the “no computer” bit but, average or not, I don’t think I know anyone without some kind of non-mobile Internet.
Nobody in my wife’s family has a laptop. Not a single person. They are tech illiterate to the point where I’m not sure they know how to use a keyboard.
That’s probably not the average user either, but they certainly help to set the average as low as it truly is…
It’s entirely plausible that this is the case for your wife’s family and others, but it’s hard for me to imagine a household without at least one non mobile computer. However, I can.
Without non mobile internet, though? Again, I can imagine it … But it seems wrong.
It shouldn’t be so hard; I was around before the internet was prevalent. My life now involves constant internet access, though, so I guess it’s weird to me that some people have lives that don’t - and especially that that might be the average.
One must always remember the words of George Carlin, I suppose.
