The Elderly and the Big Data How Older Adults Deal with Digital Privacy

Over the past decade, older persons 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 first elaborates four typical ways of elderly internet adoption and then presents an extensive empirical of privacy related behaviors of elderly residents form 3 residential communities in a large Chinese city. 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.