Abstract: Mental Models of Older Adults

Many of our findings about security and privacy have been based on an undergraduate, young, technically experienced populations. Not only the findings but the methods may fail in other domains. Quantitative and qualitative investigations show that educational and risk communication activity well-suited for the undergraduate classroom can result in failure  with a retired population began personal an interdisciplinary journey into research design tailored to an elder population.  Exploring issues of privacy, especially in home-based IoT, requires confronting a set of topical and methodological questions about the interaction of technology, risk and older adults. What do older adults understand about their digital footprint?  How do they perceive the risks of different parties access to data? What levels of risk do they perceive with regard to financial  and personal data flow?  How does can changes in risk communication enhance or bias the responses of elders? How do mental models vary between older and younger populations?   Our inchoate answers imply that findings based on solely on undergraduates require reconsideration for an aging and less technologically agile population, both informing and encouraging further research.

Bio:

Professor L. Jean Camp is a Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. She joined Indiana after eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School where her courses were also listed in Harvard Law, Harvard Business, and the Engineering Systems Division of MIT.  She spent the year after earning her doctorate from Carnegie Mellon as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She began her career as an engineer at Catawba Nuclear Station and with a MSEE at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Professor L. Jean Camp has done foundational work of the interdiscipline of economics of security and risk communication. Her publications have also addressed designing for trust including privacy-enhancing technologies, secure transactions, and the usability need to make these acceptable.  She is the author of more than two hundred publications.