“Warn Them” or “Just Block Them”?: Investigating Privacy Concerns Among Older and Working Age Adults

Prior work suggests that older adults are less aware of potential digital privacy risks compared to younger groups. We seek to expand on these findings by using drawmetrics with 20 older adults (60+) to visualize their experiences with digital privacy via drawing sessions. We further compared older...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ray Hirak, Wolf Flynn, Kuber Ravi, Aviv Adam J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Sciendo 2021-04-01
Series:Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2021-0016
Description
Summary:Prior work suggests that older adults are less aware of potential digital privacy risks compared to younger groups. We seek to expand on these findings by using drawmetrics with 20 older adults (60+) to visualize their experiences with digital privacy via drawing sessions. We further compared older adults with 20 adults of working age (18-59) with the goal of identifying both overlapping concerns and key differences that may be missed when viewing each group in isolation. We extended our evaluation with a survey with questions and themes derived from open-coding of the drawn images and confirmed three key differences between the age groups. These include older adults perceiving a greater threat from using online banking and e-commerce compared to working age adults, older adults exhibiting greater levels of concern about global scale threats, and working age adults showing more privacy-related concern regarding social media. Our findings can be used to potentially tailor applications to better accommodate privacy concerns for older adults.
ISSN:2299-0984