An Empirical Study on Digital Privacy Risk of Senior Citizens

Abstract

Nowadays, elderly people represent a large group of digital products/services users that has increased steadily since the popularity of smart phones and tablets. However, elderly people’s online behaviors let their digital privacy at a high risk situation. This paper uses the risk management theory to study the digital privacy risk of the elderly. First,presents an extensive empirical of privacy related behaviors of elderly residents form 3 residential communities in a large Chinese city. And then evaluates the impact of risk factors. Finally, the Borda count list of risk factors was given to help the elderly and their families protect digital privacy more effectively. The research shows that the digital privacy of the elderly were violated by the risk of incentives mainly from two aspects: First, privacy awareness is weak, they do not pay attention to the privacy options which provided by digital products/services, and prone to disclose too many personal information;Second, do not have enough IT knowledge to protect their digital privacy.