Tailoring Digital Privacy Education Interventions for Older Adults: A Comparative Study on Modality Preferences and Effectiveness

Abstract

Although older adults are increasingly adopting digital social technologies, a lack of knowledge and experience makes them vulnerable to digital privacy and security threats. It is, therefore, crucial to build digital privacy education interventions that empower older adults to take more control over their digital privacy. Most tutorials and support materials are designed for the younger generations and are not necessarily as effective for the older population. In this paper, we explore the development of education interventions suited to the learning styles of the older adult population. We particularly develop interventions that span a variety of modalities (text, videos, audio presentations, infographics, comics, interactive tutorials, and chatbots) and evaluate these interventions in a focus group study, gathering feedback from both older and younger adults regarding the education interventions and how to improve them. Our findings demonstrate that there are distinct differences in modality preferences between older and younger adults. In this paper, we discuss our findings and contribute to the development of digital privacy education interventions that are tailored to the specific needs and preferences of older adults.