IMO the “getting scarier” is the swinging back part. Grew up in the same time, my parents were big on “No identifying information to anyone on the internet!” I joke with them now that their generation, the ones that told us to stay off post all their business on facebook and the like.

But that’s the thing, you have a small segment of society that was the internet nerds that didn’t trust anything on the internet, hid themselves and the like, but now like you say it’s the corporate walled garden that’s sanitized and happy, which makes that veneer of trust. And boy do people trust it, posting anything and everything.

Odds are lower in percentages of being genuinely victimized as a child, but the lack of paying attention what’s posted has lead to a lot of effects, so people are getting worried again.

Here’s something tangentially related that makes it difficult to find older options, the support. In the US a piece of medical device has to be supported for 7 years. My hospital has these bladder scanners that are in quite a few departments, regular fixture in hospitals (ultrasounds). Jan 1 2024 was when our came up on the 7 year mark. To do preventative maintenance calibration required logging on their server, guess what’s no longer accessible? So to stay in compliance all of us in the biomed department has to figure out how to get new ones to replace the 10 $11k each paperweights we have now.

Why are they chasing pennies? Because they can. It’s really simple as that nowadays.

like a notification LED, MicroSD card slot and headphone jack

Ah, another Galaxy S9?