The increasing use of online cookies for data collection has raised privacy concerns, including risks of price discrimination and targeted advertising. Yet, many users struggle to understand different types of cookies and their implications. This highlights a need for targeted educational initiatives aimed at empowering users to better understand online cookies and online privacy. This study examines age differences in the effectiveness of four privacy education modalities—text, interactive tutorial, chatbot, and video—on improving knowledge and behavior related to online tracking. Using a mixed-design experiment, we found that all modalities enhanced privacy knowledge and behaviors among younger and older adults. However, preferences and effectiveness varied by age group: younger adults responded best to chatbot and text formats, while older adults benefited more from the interactive tutorial and video. These findings highlight the need to tailor privacy education to users’ learning preferences to improve engagement and outcomes across age groups.

Several social networking sites offer automated machine translation of posts, but authors usually have no access to view or modify these translations. This may increase authors' concerns about whether the translations convey their intended meaning. To address this issue, we test a theory-driven model about human-in-the-loop translation using an online between-subjects experiment (N = 216). In our study, participants write fictitious social media status updates in a language other than English, which are then translated with one of three levels of automation: machine-provided translation with no author modifiability (MPT), where authors can view the machine translation but cannot modify it; author-provided translation (APT), where authors manually write the translation with no machine assistance; and machine-provided translation with author modifiability (MPT-AM), where authors can edit the machine translation of their post. We collect objective and subjective measures of users' experience using the assigned translation feature. The results from a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis demonstrate that, compared to the MPT and APT conditions, participants in the MPT-AM condition reported higher measures of perceived control, ease of use, and perceived comfort, which in turn predicted higher perceived system effectiveness and ultimately increased intention to use the MPT-AM translation feature. Follow-up interviews ( n = 15) found that participants appreciate the ability to edit and/or remove translations from their posts, even if they did not always do so.

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.