Optimising technological literacy acquirement to protect privacy and security

ABSTRACT

In the contemporary digital era, users may take actions which may affect their privacy and security without being aware of the consequences. Knowing the consequences, may be perceived as a higher level of usability, above the basic operational skills. This phenomenon is mainly a direct outcome of the gap between users’ knowledge and the complexity of the digital systems. The ability to master those systems is known as technological literacy, which thus is a critical factor to protect privacy and security. However, the process of acquiring technological literacy is costly and not trivial. In this research, we address the problem with a qualitative approach, and introduce a methodology named OTLA (Optimising Technological Literacy Acquirement) to achieve optimality between the cost of the teaching process and its benefits. We conducted an empirical study with n = 320 participants on five technological literacy issues, and showed that optimal solutions to this problem can be found. Thus, OTLA has a significant contribution to protecting users’ privacy and security in the digital world.

KEYWORDS:

• Privacy
• information security
• technological literacy
• usability

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Ariel University, grant number RA2000000076.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Forecasts show that by 2021 there will be about 2.16 billion worldwide online buyers, compared to 1.67 billion in 2016.

2 We assume the order of teaching will not affect the results; however, this may be investigated in further research.

3 At the time of writing this paper, this feature was removed by Zoom, due to a protest of privacy violation.

4 (a) This feature is off by default, but nudged to be turned on when the device is first time initialised, or after a factory reset. We conducted a small sampling, and found that this feature is active in most users’ mobile devices. (b) The feature is also available on iPhones, named ‘Significant locations’.