A more robust measurement might be the (former) US Department of Education's "Adult Literacy in the United States" survey, most recently conducted in 2019. The results of this are sobering enough:

<https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp>.

There's a related study of adult technical literacy conducted in 33 OECD nations:

<https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926...>.

Both show that only a small fraction (5--10%) of adults operate at high levels of literacy (whether of text, numeracy, or technology), and that a large fraction (roughly 50%) operate at a minimal or below-minimal rate.

True education? What idiot would say yes to this?

Even if you _know_ the debit card transaction is safe, there’s no reason to risk it when a weirdo is filming you with some wild contraption.

Anything like this is going to have a very heavy selection bias, don't take any of this kind of content as a reflection of the average person.

Many of of witnessed the technical literacy of the general population when we ran to show them ChatGPT 3.5, and they just kind of shrugged like "So? What are you showing me?"