You're not reading research. You're reading news articles. There are unscrupulous "journalists" out there that spend all day scanning research journals for studies they can turn into shocking stories to get clicks.
Journalists are at fault, but they're not the only ones. See PHD Comics.
The research might have said "people who wear tight pants have a 1.2% greater risk of cancer given this study and these error parameters." After the study passed through the various layers of reporting, though, it turned into JEANS CAUSE CANCER!!!!!
I seem to cause high blood pressure in my wife. Especially when I have my blood pressure taken and it is insanely low. I have the blood pressure of a marathon runner. Not the rest of the body, mind you. Just the blood pressure.
A contract is one thing, having a line buried in your website's Terms of Use that states "By using this website you agree to not post any bad reviews about us anywhere" is another thing. In the case of the former, it's an agreement entered into by two parties where both had the opportunity to review the terms of the contract. In the case of the latter, it is a weak attempt to silence disgruntled customers. (See the KlearGear case posted above.)
This lead me to wonder what the term would be for people who post bad reviews of a company/product for the purposes of helping that company/product's competitor. For example, if LG paid people to post horrible reviews about the new Samsung phone. Obviously, they are not shills, but there doesn't seem to be an exact term for these people.
This Wikipedia section discusses it and they suggest either "false flag" (though that's more military-related) or "straw man." In the case of the latter, it references misrepresenting an opponent's argument, easily refuting the misrepresented argument, and then using that to "prove" you are right. These fake bad reviews allow you to misrepresent how good a competitor's product/service is, thus "proving" that yours is better.
Does anyone know if there actually is a term that I just didn't find in my admittedly quick Googling?
A lot of times, I find bad reviews to be uninformative. You often get a mix of people who don't seem able to articulate WHY they are giving a bad review, just that it is bad ("WORST. ITEM. EVAH!!!111!!!!") and people who refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for poor performance being due to their own mistakes (e.g. a product that says it requires X with a 1 star review that says "After ordering this product, I tried for 2 HOURS to get it to work. Finally, I called Customer Service and they said it needs X to work. What a scam!!!").
I tend to find the overall pattern of reviews more informative. If 85% of the reviews are 4 or 5 stars, 10% are 3 stars, and 5% are 1 or 2 stars, then the product is likely to be good. If 50% are 4 or 5 stars, 20% are 3 stars, and 30% are 1 or 2 stars, I'd shy away from buying the product.
I was tempted into doing this a couple of times. (Stopped at a red light. Hear a notification come in. Think "well, I'm stopped, I can check it.") The times I did it, I felt extremely unsafe. Now, I have a pattern lock on my phone. Not only is it increased security from "swipe to open", but it makes it much harder to casually try to open your phone while stopped at a light. The increased difficulty in checking the messages helps reduce the temptation and makes it less likely that I'll listen to the "you can do it this time and still be safe" voice in my head.
What I don't understand is the violent response some people have. Either actual (Person wearing Google Glass has them ripped off their face) or online comments ("If I ever see someone with Google Glass, I'll punch them in the face!"). Replace "Google Glass" with "Smartphone in a shirt pocket" and it would seem totally ridiculous. (e.g. Punching someone because they have a smartphone in their shirt pocket.) However, some people seem to think that, once Google Glass is involved, all social conventions go out the window.
You could also record someone much less obviously with a smartphone and a dress shirt. Hit record on the phone, stick the phone in the shirt's pocket with the lens facing out, walk around recording people until your microSD card is filled. A 64GB microSD card ($30 or so on Amazon, so definitely not cost-prohibitive) can allow for over 22 hours of recording time. You could theoretically record your entire day with your smartphone in your pocket (assuming you could somehow make the battery last for recording that long).
Existing laws are good enough to protect public photography and yet disallow abuses. For example, when you're out and about in public, you have no expectation of privacy. You don't expect that people won't be able to see you walking down the street. So if someone takes a photo of you, you have no grounds to object. However, a person typically does not consent to the area under their clothes being filmed - even if they are out in public. Taking an upskirt shot of someone typically requires positioning your camera in an unusual manner to capture a shot that your average "person walking past" wouldn't see. There is an expectation of privacy under your clothes. Unless a woman pulls her skirt up of her own volition in a public area (thus removing the expectation of privacy), she is not giving "permission" for a photo to be taken up her skirt merely because she's wearing a skirt.
Which is different than my current smartphone. I could hit record, put my smartphone in my shirt pocket (camera lens facing out) and walk around recording people without their knowledge.
But people freak out about Google Glass as if it's something entirely new and frightening.
A weapons grade helium bomb raises the voices of everyone in a five mile area to the point that it's above the human hearing range, thus disabling the enemy's communications.
Obviously, we need to watch out for potential terrorists in the form of people holding balloons.
Don't even get me started on the weapons-grade ice cream and the disabling headaches is causes.
I can't speak to other science denialism, but I spent some time in an Orthodox temple where the rabbi was a strong opponent of Evolution. (I spent time there when I disagreed with the rabbi so much only because my parents belonged there and so I didn't need to pay any dues to join.) The rabbi's argument basically boiled down to "Scientists keep changing their theories. Our 'God did it' theory never changes. Therefore, our theory is stronger and theirs is weaker, ours is right and theirs is wrong."
Religion has a strong reliance on the past and a strong element of momentum. You do X because Very Religious Person Y said you should and therefore your father, his father, and his father did X. X has been done for generations and any changing of X would be against your religion. If a new situation crops up, it must be somehow fit into the most applicable existing situation and made to follow the Old Rules. Any change is bad because it means veering from The Way Things Always Were. Even if they actually weren't always like that, the past will often be retconned to either ignore unsavory events or to re-write what people did. (e.g. The bible says Abraham served milk and meat together. That's not allowed in the Jewish religion but this was before the Kosher laws were given. Still, having that big of a figure ignoring Kosher is icky so that passage is "retconned" by an explanation that he served them in the proper order and separated in time just the right way,
The end result of this is that science, with it's ever-changing theories, is seen as bad - even though the theories change to better suit the data. Meanwhile, religion, with it's never changing rules (or, at least, rules that "have always been" this way once you retcon them) is seen as better.
Is your argument really: "Since the deniers keep denying, you'll have to eventually accept that they are right because they don't stop denying"?
You do realize that this could be applied in other areas where it would be even more obviously wrong:
"Since the Evolution-deniers keep denying Evolution, you'll need to one day accept that Evolution is wrong because 'how many times am I going to have to blow off the 'deniers' before I consider maybe I'm wrong about Evolution?'"
"Since the vaccine-deniers keep insisting that vaccines are poison and don't work, you'll need to one day accept that vaccines are poison and don't work because 'how many times am I going to have to blow off the 'deniers' before I consider maybe I'm wrong about vaccines?'"
Just because a group denies something strongly and repeatedly doesn't make them right.
I was still me, but someone else was pretending to be me and, by doing so, was damaging my financial reputation. Thus, the value of "me" (financially) was put at risk. To use a car analogy, it would be as if someone "borrowed" your car every night when they knew you were asleep and returned it by the time you awoke. You still had full use of the car, but mysterious dings that "appeared" on the car would reduce the value of it.
As far as the representative being an accomplice, I don't think that was the case as everyone I talked to in that company varied from unhelpful to actively stonewalling both me and the police. At this point, it doesn't matter. My credit is frozen which means nobody can open a new line of credit - not even me - unless I first thaw my credit file (and pay for the "privilege".)
Yes, my identity was stolen. The thieves had access to my name, SSN, date of birth, and address. From where, I'll never know. (The police were little help and the credit card company actively stonewalled them.) Had the thieves not paid for rush delivery of the credit card they opened in my name and THEN changed the address on the card, the card wouldn't have accidentally been delivered to me instead of to them. Then, they would have been able to run up a tab in my name and I would have been on the hook to pay it. At least, until I proved that I wasn't responsible for the debt which would have been an arduous process. As it was, merely convincing the credit card company that I didn't open the card account was difficult as the representative tried claiming that perhaps my wife opened the account in my name with my information without telling me. (She didn't.)
Of course, I agree with the rest of your statement. Some idiot didn't check things. The mother's maiden name wasn't even close and yet the card was approved. No red flags went up when the address was immediately changed to another state's address. No red flags went up when "I" called asking for a $5,000 cash advance when the card wasn't activated yet.
As far as incompetence goes, I think it's partly that, but partly a lack of caring. Badly issued credit cards aren't THEIR problem. They're the problem of the people who have the cards opened in their name and the merchants who get paid with the bad cards and then have the money pulled back. The credit card companies lose little to no money on this and so don't have an incentive to fix the system.
In fact, even helping with an investigation "hurts" them. When I asked what the address on the account was, Capital One refused to give it to me. I had the right name, social security number, and date of birth, but they wouldn't give me the address because (their exact words): "If you go and kill those people, we're liable." So giving someone a credit card in my name that could potentially devastate my credit? No problem. Divulging the address of said people to the person who actually has the name/SSN/DOB of the account? Big problem.
Maybe I wasn't clear. We were with Rackspace for years and decided to go with another hosting provider. So, a few weeks before the end of our term, I told them we'd like to cancel at the end of the term. I was told I needed to pay for an additional month due to some obscure contract line.
When I cancelled with my last dedicated hosting provider, I made sure ahead of time to ask what I needed to do. They said I could log into their panel and submit a cancellation request effective either immediately or on a certain date (like the end of my payment term). No requirement to have an entire month's notice.
Nope. I can take a photo and put it on my website. By doing so, I'm granting people the right to view that photo and make copies of it in the process of viewing it. If they want to save it locally for their own personal use, there's not much I can do to stop them. (That's part of the trade-off of putting it online.)
If, however, someone decides that it is a great photo and they want to sell shirts, coffee mugs, posters, etc bearing the photo, they need to come to me to ask for permission. If they want to use the photo in a flyer or ad, they need to come to me. If they want to use the photo in any way that isn't personal use, they need to approach me and ask for permission. This has been proven over and over where some company just grabs an image off Flickr, uses it in some ad campaign, and then winds up sued because they didn't ask for permission.
All this being said, there are sites where people post images specifically placing them in the public domain or keeping copyright and allowing non-commercial or even commercial use of the images. However, simply being online =/= public domain.
It seems like banks are "in on the scam" by dodging THEIR DUTIES here, in not verifying check or money order funds being present OR if they are legit (not stolen or counterfeited etc.).
I don't have an experience with this, but my identity was stolen once and I got the same impression about the credit card companies and credit agencies. If your identity is stolen, it's no big deal for them. They just push back and bad charges to the companies they came from. e.g. If Crook steals your identity, opens a credit card in your name, and goes on a spending spree at Electronics Hut, Electronics Hut will be caught having to pay for all of that equipment that Crook "bought."
The same seems to be true about this check fraud. The bank doesn't care if the check you deposit bounces horrendously. After all, if it does, it doesn't hurt them. It hurts you. Since they aren't hurt, they see check fraud as something for their customers to worry about instead of something that they could work to reduce. Now, if a "cleared" check gave the person that money, the money couldn't be yanked back once the bad check bounced, and the bank was stuck covering the deficit, you can guarantee that banks would have a fix in place for this scam within a week.
Bah! You don't know what you're talking about. Why I put all of my Dead Nigerian Prince money and International Lottery winnings into this giant Scrooge McDuck-style vault. I shall now swim in it.
*jumps into money vault*
*horrible thudding sound as I hit the bottom of the empty vault*
I think another part of it is that technology/the Internet is a complete unknown to many elderly people. They don't properly know what's what online perhaps knowing enough to check their e-mail and Facebook. Ignorance of anything (no matter what your age) opens you up for fraud based on that thing.
For example, I know nearly nothing about cars beyond basic maintenance. I go to a trusted mechanic. If he told me that a part needed to be replaced, I'd have to trust him. He could be defrauding me for all I know. To those who say "Well, just learn about cars": I don't have the time to learn everything about everything. I'd have to learn cars to double-check my mechanic, medicine to double-check my doctor, etc. At some point, you need to trust an expert about something that you don't know about.
Normally, you can fight ignorance with education, but many elderly don't see the reason to learn about technology/the Internet in depth. They are used to doing things a certain way and that's how they'll do it for the rest of their lives. I suspect that when I'm old, despite my attempts to keep up with technology, there will be things that I don't understand and that I regard with a wary eye because "In my day, we didn't do things like that." And while I'm shaking a fist at this strange new technology and yelling at kids to get off my lawn, the young folks will roll their eyes at how clueless I am over basic technology. (Where "basic" means "we grew up with this and know nothing else.")
Clueless people and greedy people. It's amazing how many people will do something they know is shady just because of the allure of the money they are promised.
Not to mention that the airlines have a financial incentive to make the seats smaller beyond fitting more people in the plane. If the seats are small enough and a passenger is going to take up more than one seat, they can charge him for two seats' worth. This might not have seemed like a major issue when the seats fit 95% of passengers. However, if the seats wind up fitting only 50% of passengers, then half of the passengers are going to have to pay double to fly. And while "well those people should just lose weight" *might* have been a semi-valid retort before, "losing weight" won't narrow the distance between the ends of your shoulder bones.
Sadly, as the airlines keep changing seat size, they don't publish this information. (That I'm aware of, I'd love to see a report on this.) This means consumers can't make an informed decision on the matter - just what the airlines want.
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I'd add frozen veggies into there too. They have all of the advantages of fresh with a lower risk of spoilage.
Canned veggies, though, should be your last resort. Only use those when no other veggies are available.
Journalists are at fault, but they're not the only ones. See PHD Comics.
The research might have said "people who wear tight pants have a 1.2% greater risk of cancer given this study and these error parameters." After the study passed through the various layers of reporting, though, it turned into JEANS CAUSE CANCER!!!!!
I seem to cause high blood pressure in my wife. Especially when I have my blood pressure taken and it is insanely low. I have the blood pressure of a marathon runner. Not the rest of the body, mind you. Just the blood pressure.
A contract is one thing, having a line buried in your website's Terms of Use that states "By using this website you agree to not post any bad reviews about us anywhere" is another thing. In the case of the former, it's an agreement entered into by two parties where both had the opportunity to review the terms of the contract. In the case of the latter, it is a weak attempt to silence disgruntled customers. (See the KlearGear case posted above.)
This lead me to wonder what the term would be for people who post bad reviews of a company/product for the purposes of helping that company/product's competitor. For example, if LG paid people to post horrible reviews about the new Samsung phone. Obviously, they are not shills, but there doesn't seem to be an exact term for these people.
This Wikipedia section discusses it and they suggest either "false flag" (though that's more military-related) or "straw man." In the case of the latter, it references misrepresenting an opponent's argument, easily refuting the misrepresented argument, and then using that to "prove" you are right. These fake bad reviews allow you to misrepresent how good a competitor's product/service is, thus "proving" that yours is better.
Does anyone know if there actually is a term that I just didn't find in my admittedly quick Googling?
A lot of times, I find bad reviews to be uninformative. You often get a mix of people who don't seem able to articulate WHY they are giving a bad review, just that it is bad ("WORST. ITEM. EVAH!!!111!!!!") and people who refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for poor performance being due to their own mistakes (e.g. a product that says it requires X with a 1 star review that says "After ordering this product, I tried for 2 HOURS to get it to work. Finally, I called Customer Service and they said it needs X to work. What a scam!!!").
I tend to find the overall pattern of reviews more informative. If 85% of the reviews are 4 or 5 stars, 10% are 3 stars, and 5% are 1 or 2 stars, then the product is likely to be good. If 50% are 4 or 5 stars, 20% are 3 stars, and 30% are 1 or 2 stars, I'd shy away from buying the product.
I was tempted into doing this a couple of times. (Stopped at a red light. Hear a notification come in. Think "well, I'm stopped, I can check it.") The times I did it, I felt extremely unsafe. Now, I have a pattern lock on my phone. Not only is it increased security from "swipe to open", but it makes it much harder to casually try to open your phone while stopped at a light. The increased difficulty in checking the messages helps reduce the temptation and makes it less likely that I'll listen to the "you can do it this time and still be safe" voice in my head.
What I don't understand is the violent response some people have. Either actual (Person wearing Google Glass has them ripped off their face) or online comments ("If I ever see someone with Google Glass, I'll punch them in the face!"). Replace "Google Glass" with "Smartphone in a shirt pocket" and it would seem totally ridiculous. (e.g. Punching someone because they have a smartphone in their shirt pocket.) However, some people seem to think that, once Google Glass is involved, all social conventions go out the window.
You could also record someone much less obviously with a smartphone and a dress shirt. Hit record on the phone, stick the phone in the shirt's pocket with the lens facing out, walk around recording people until your microSD card is filled. A 64GB microSD card ($30 or so on Amazon, so definitely not cost-prohibitive) can allow for over 22 hours of recording time. You could theoretically record your entire day with your smartphone in your pocket (assuming you could somehow make the battery last for recording that long).
Existing laws are good enough to protect public photography and yet disallow abuses. For example, when you're out and about in public, you have no expectation of privacy. You don't expect that people won't be able to see you walking down the street. So if someone takes a photo of you, you have no grounds to object. However, a person typically does not consent to the area under their clothes being filmed - even if they are out in public. Taking an upskirt shot of someone typically requires positioning your camera in an unusual manner to capture a shot that your average "person walking past" wouldn't see. There is an expectation of privacy under your clothes. Unless a woman pulls her skirt up of her own volition in a public area (thus removing the expectation of privacy), she is not giving "permission" for a photo to be taken up her skirt merely because she's wearing a skirt.
Which is different than my current smartphone. I could hit record, put my smartphone in my shirt pocket (camera lens facing out) and walk around recording people without their knowledge.
But people freak out about Google Glass as if it's something entirely new and frightening.
Part balloon helium raises your voice.
A weapons grade helium bomb raises the voices of everyone in a five mile area to the point that it's above the human hearing range, thus disabling the enemy's communications.
Obviously, we need to watch out for potential terrorists in the form of people holding balloons.
Don't even get me started on the weapons-grade ice cream and the disabling headaches is causes.
I can't speak to other science denialism, but I spent some time in an Orthodox temple where the rabbi was a strong opponent of Evolution. (I spent time there when I disagreed with the rabbi so much only because my parents belonged there and so I didn't need to pay any dues to join.) The rabbi's argument basically boiled down to "Scientists keep changing their theories. Our 'God did it' theory never changes. Therefore, our theory is stronger and theirs is weaker, ours is right and theirs is wrong."
Religion has a strong reliance on the past and a strong element of momentum. You do X because Very Religious Person Y said you should and therefore your father, his father, and his father did X. X has been done for generations and any changing of X would be against your religion. If a new situation crops up, it must be somehow fit into the most applicable existing situation and made to follow the Old Rules. Any change is bad because it means veering from The Way Things Always Were. Even if they actually weren't always like that, the past will often be retconned to either ignore unsavory events or to re-write what people did. (e.g. The bible says Abraham served milk and meat together. That's not allowed in the Jewish religion but this was before the Kosher laws were given. Still, having that big of a figure ignoring Kosher is icky so that passage is "retconned" by an explanation that he served them in the proper order and separated in time just the right way,
The end result of this is that science, with it's ever-changing theories, is seen as bad - even though the theories change to better suit the data. Meanwhile, religion, with it's never changing rules (or, at least, rules that "have always been" this way once you retcon them) is seen as better.
Is your argument really: "Since the deniers keep denying, you'll have to eventually accept that they are right because they don't stop denying"?
You do realize that this could be applied in other areas where it would be even more obviously wrong:
"Since the Evolution-deniers keep denying Evolution, you'll need to one day accept that Evolution is wrong because 'how many times am I going to have to blow off the 'deniers' before I consider maybe I'm wrong about Evolution?'"
"Since the vaccine-deniers keep insisting that vaccines are poison and don't work, you'll need to one day accept that vaccines are poison and don't work because 'how many times am I going to have to blow off the 'deniers' before I consider maybe I'm wrong about vaccines?'"
Just because a group denies something strongly and repeatedly doesn't make them right.
I was still me, but someone else was pretending to be me and, by doing so, was damaging my financial reputation. Thus, the value of "me" (financially) was put at risk. To use a car analogy, it would be as if someone "borrowed" your car every night when they knew you were asleep and returned it by the time you awoke. You still had full use of the car, but mysterious dings that "appeared" on the car would reduce the value of it.
As far as the representative being an accomplice, I don't think that was the case as everyone I talked to in that company varied from unhelpful to actively stonewalling both me and the police. At this point, it doesn't matter. My credit is frozen which means nobody can open a new line of credit - not even me - unless I first thaw my credit file (and pay for the "privilege".)
Well, then obviously, you charge those ad distributors for a silver ad plan that gets by the filters.
Then charge customers for a silver ad blocking plan that blocks them.
But a gold ad plan will get by that.
But a gold ad blocking plan will block that.
But a platinum ad plan will get by even that....
Queue Comcast's CEO singing "We're In The Money!"
Yes, my identity was stolen. The thieves had access to my name, SSN, date of birth, and address. From where, I'll never know. (The police were little help and the credit card company actively stonewalled them.) Had the thieves not paid for rush delivery of the credit card they opened in my name and THEN changed the address on the card, the card wouldn't have accidentally been delivered to me instead of to them. Then, they would have been able to run up a tab in my name and I would have been on the hook to pay it. At least, until I proved that I wasn't responsible for the debt which would have been an arduous process. As it was, merely convincing the credit card company that I didn't open the card account was difficult as the representative tried claiming that perhaps my wife opened the account in my name with my information without telling me. (She didn't.)
Of course, I agree with the rest of your statement. Some idiot didn't check things. The mother's maiden name wasn't even close and yet the card was approved. No red flags went up when the address was immediately changed to another state's address. No red flags went up when "I" called asking for a $5,000 cash advance when the card wasn't activated yet.
As far as incompetence goes, I think it's partly that, but partly a lack of caring. Badly issued credit cards aren't THEIR problem. They're the problem of the people who have the cards opened in their name and the merchants who get paid with the bad cards and then have the money pulled back. The credit card companies lose little to no money on this and so don't have an incentive to fix the system.
In fact, even helping with an investigation "hurts" them. When I asked what the address on the account was, Capital One refused to give it to me. I had the right name, social security number, and date of birth, but they wouldn't give me the address because (their exact words): "If you go and kill those people, we're liable." So giving someone a credit card in my name that could potentially devastate my credit? No problem. Divulging the address of said people to the person who actually has the name/SSN/DOB of the account? Big problem.
Maybe I wasn't clear. We were with Rackspace for years and decided to go with another hosting provider. So, a few weeks before the end of our term, I told them we'd like to cancel at the end of the term. I was told I needed to pay for an additional month due to some obscure contract line.
When I cancelled with my last dedicated hosting provider, I made sure ahead of time to ask what I needed to do. They said I could log into their panel and submit a cancellation request effective either immediately or on a certain date (like the end of my payment term). No requirement to have an entire month's notice.
I was going to comment on how people aren't "freight", but I think that's where we're headed.
Soon people might go on diets before a trip not so they'll fit in that bathing suit better, but so they'll save some money on the pre-flight weigh-in.
Nope. I can take a photo and put it on my website. By doing so, I'm granting people the right to view that photo and make copies of it in the process of viewing it. If they want to save it locally for their own personal use, there's not much I can do to stop them. (That's part of the trade-off of putting it online.)
If, however, someone decides that it is a great photo and they want to sell shirts, coffee mugs, posters, etc bearing the photo, they need to come to me to ask for permission. If they want to use the photo in a flyer or ad, they need to come to me. If they want to use the photo in any way that isn't personal use, they need to approach me and ask for permission. This has been proven over and over where some company just grabs an image off Flickr, uses it in some ad campaign, and then winds up sued because they didn't ask for permission.
All this being said, there are sites where people post images specifically placing them in the public domain or keeping copyright and allowing non-commercial or even commercial use of the images. However, simply being online =/= public domain.
I don't have an experience with this, but my identity was stolen once and I got the same impression about the credit card companies and credit agencies. If your identity is stolen, it's no big deal for them. They just push back and bad charges to the companies they came from. e.g. If Crook steals your identity, opens a credit card in your name, and goes on a spending spree at Electronics Hut, Electronics Hut will be caught having to pay for all of that equipment that Crook "bought."
The same seems to be true about this check fraud. The bank doesn't care if the check you deposit bounces horrendously. After all, if it does, it doesn't hurt them. It hurts you. Since they aren't hurt, they see check fraud as something for their customers to worry about instead of something that they could work to reduce. Now, if a "cleared" check gave the person that money, the money couldn't be yanked back once the bad check bounced, and the bank was stuck covering the deficit, you can guarantee that banks would have a fix in place for this scam within a week.
Bah! You don't know what you're talking about. Why I put all of my Dead Nigerian Prince money and International Lottery winnings into this giant Scrooge McDuck-style vault. I shall now swim in it.
*jumps into money vault*
*horrible thudding sound as I hit the bottom of the empty vault*
I think another part of it is that technology/the Internet is a complete unknown to many elderly people. They don't properly know what's what online perhaps knowing enough to check their e-mail and Facebook. Ignorance of anything (no matter what your age) opens you up for fraud based on that thing.
For example, I know nearly nothing about cars beyond basic maintenance. I go to a trusted mechanic. If he told me that a part needed to be replaced, I'd have to trust him. He could be defrauding me for all I know. To those who say "Well, just learn about cars": I don't have the time to learn everything about everything. I'd have to learn cars to double-check my mechanic, medicine to double-check my doctor, etc. At some point, you need to trust an expert about something that you don't know about.
Normally, you can fight ignorance with education, but many elderly don't see the reason to learn about technology/the Internet in depth. They are used to doing things a certain way and that's how they'll do it for the rest of their lives. I suspect that when I'm old, despite my attempts to keep up with technology, there will be things that I don't understand and that I regard with a wary eye because "In my day, we didn't do things like that." And while I'm shaking a fist at this strange new technology and yelling at kids to get off my lawn, the young folks will roll their eyes at how clueless I am over basic technology. (Where "basic" means "we grew up with this and know nothing else.")
Clueless people and greedy people. It's amazing how many people will do something they know is shady just because of the allure of the money they are promised.
Not to mention that the airlines have a financial incentive to make the seats smaller beyond fitting more people in the plane. If the seats are small enough and a passenger is going to take up more than one seat, they can charge him for two seats' worth. This might not have seemed like a major issue when the seats fit 95% of passengers. However, if the seats wind up fitting only 50% of passengers, then half of the passengers are going to have to pay double to fly. And while "well those people should just lose weight" *might* have been a semi-valid retort before, "losing weight" won't narrow the distance between the ends of your shoulder bones.
Sadly, as the airlines keep changing seat size, they don't publish this information. (That I'm aware of, I'd love to see a report on this.) This means consumers can't make an informed decision on the matter - just what the airlines want.