Senior Citizens

Senior citizens v.s. Digital Literacy and Cyberscams

As the world becomes more reliant on digital technology, the danger of the digital divide intensifies. From calling and texting, to sending emails and joining video calls, staying connected through digital technology is an essential part of modern society. What happens when this cutting-edge technology serves its primary users, but marginalizes the most vulnerable? The latest social media and communication platforms are not typically made for older adults. Small text sizes, low contrasting colors, and advanced digital design makes some products inaccessible to those who are not digital natives. As the language of technology grows, and the average user becomes more advanced, interfaces get more confusing to those who are less familiar.

Older Adults vs Targeted Cybercrimes

The coronavirus pandemic has made life significantly more difficult for older adults. Since this population is among the most vulnerable, any physical human assistance is limited. Online grocery delivery set up, remote doctor visits, and even virtual socialization has become essential to maintaining the safety and wellness of older adults. Those who cannot cross this digital divide get left behind. With health concerns added to the mix, digital activity becomes a major lifestyle requirement.

Cybercrimes and Phishing Scams:

Cybercrimes towards older adults have quintupled over the last five years, racking up over $650 million dollars in financial losses each year, based on an FBI statistic. Many of these crimes also go unreported since older adults often don't know how to respond to these attacks. While there are law enforcement solutions to protect cybercrime victims, older adults are not educated about how to receive this assistance.

Phishing is a major threat to the older population of digital users. Phishing is a fraudulent attempt to elicit private information or data through impersonating another person's identity. This is most common through emails, auction sites, and social networking platforms. Foreign emails about a Nigerian prince or a long lost cousin target older users and attempt to take their money. Since older adults are less familiar with the digital world, they are significantly more vulnerable to phishing scams.

What to do:

While we cant simply teach every older adult how to be a tech-savvy internet surfer, we can develop better informative materials for the education and safety of older adults in the digital world. We can also be more aware of cybercrimes that target older populations. There are many resources for technology education for older adult users as well as best practices for smaller tasks such as password management. For example, it is much safer for older adults to keep several passwords written down on a piece of paper at their desk than it is to have the same password for all their accounts. These practices, while seemingly nontrivial, could make up the difference between safe digital activity and vulnerable digital activity. Some resources to help older adults understand how to use technology can be found here:

Skillful Senior FBI Scam Reporting 8 Basic Tech Training Resources for Seniors Fraud.org

Inaccessible platforms:

Every update and rebrand that a tech company publishes, attempts to make their user experience more efficient and convenient for the primary user. Unnecessary words are removed. A “search” button is simply replaced with a magnifying glass icon. With these ‘sleek’ updates, older adults become more confused and lost. Don Norman explains “Current interaction designs often feature illegible text, tiny targets, startling sounds, and other features that make the online world unfriendly to older users.” (Nielsen Norman Group). He states based on his research, that things like small, lightly colored text on mobile interfaces and interactive elements such as dropdown items are challenging to this demographic. Other common conventions such as links, copy/pasting, and pop up windows can elicit frustration to older internet users. Forms that time out after too long also make it difficult for older adults to use. The demographic spends much more time analyzing each page in a digital interface before they understand what they are looking at. Many older adults suffer from memory loss. Remembering passwords, usernames, and other sensitive information is also extremely difficult. And since they are unfamiliar with the internet, time is also a major factor into their activity. Older adults consume visual media differently than new digital natives do. Design patterns and visual cues are just not universal across these two groups.

Evolution over time

While many older adults are still unable to send a text message on their own, this population of digitally literate users is shrinking. In the last 18 years, older adults have become slightly more technologically proficient, due to the age of the digital world. There is promise that foundational blockers that challenge older adults such as basic emailing concepts will phase out as the older population becomes more familiar with the dawn of the internet. But since technology expands and matures atan exponential rate, it is clear there will always be new updates to digital proficiency that favor younger users and change too quickly for older users to keep up.

So how can technologies support older adults and allow them to stay connected to a world that's rapidly expanding online? It is the responsibility of the designers of the technology to make platforms accessible to older adults who need them. Interfaces that are essential for digital navigation such as emails, facebook, grocery ordering, hospital appointment booking, etc. must be accessible to those who suffer from poor vision, hearing, or memory retention. Thus, seniors are a vulnerable population in the digital world. They need proper education and protection for digital devices that have become so crucial to the modern world.

Sources:

Fazzini, Kate. “Here's How Online Scammers Prey on Older Americans, and What They Should Know to Fight Back.” CNBC, CNBC, 23 Nov. 2019, www.cnbc.com/2019/11/23/new-research-pinpoints-how-elderly-people-are-targeted-in-online-scams.html.

World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience. (n.d.). Usability for seniors: Challenges and changes. Retrieved March 15, 2021, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-for-senior-citizens/ Senior computer skills index: Learn basic computer skills. (n.d.). Retrieved March 15, 2021, from http://www.skillfulsenior.com/skills/ Unai Diaz-Orueta, L. (n.d.). Shaping technologies for older adults with and without dementia: Reflections on ethics and Preferences - Unai diaz-orueta, Louise hopper, EVDOKIMOS konstantinidis, 2020. Retrieved March 15, 2021, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1460458219899590

Staff, F. (2021, March 01). Fraud.org staff. Retrieved March 15, 2021, from https://fraud.org/common-scams/