Collective Online Safety Support for Older Adults
Tamir Mendel is a Ph.D. candidate advised by Dr. Eran Toch at the Department of Industrial Engineering,
Tel Aviv University, 8 March 2022, 14:00 PM, Room 206 via zoom
Abstract:
Older adults face growing difficulties managing mobile security and privacy threats in rapidly changing technological environments. However, many do not meet these challenges alone, and they rely on family and friends for support and advice. I developed new technology methods to enhance older adults’ support networks. In doing so, the thesis aims to extend Collective Efficacy to increase older adults’ confidence and their ability to address privacy and security issues. In this seminar, I will first provide the relevant background, including collective efficacy as a theoretical construct and existing technologies that care about online safety for older adults. I will review my research that utilizes online experiments, model fitting, and co-design sessions, to understand how social technologies can support older adults in online safety problems. I will present in detail a proactive support model for older adults that predicts moments when users might need online support. The study compared machine learning models to identify supportable moments and showed that the random forest method performs better than other models with an accuracy of 78%. I illustrate how the composition of age can affect how the sample impacts the model performance. Finally, I will present Meerkat, a social support mobile application that helps older adults interact with mobile applications by receiving contextual support from friends and family or a community of volunteers. I summarize the seminar by suggesting a new theoretical model for collective efficacy in online safety that highlighted social groups rather than the individual user as our primary unit of engagement and analysis.
Bio:
Tamir Mendel is a Ph.D. candidate advised by Dr. Eran Toch at the Department of Industrial Engineering, Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on usable privacy and security, mobile and social computing, and accessibility. More information is available at Tamir website
