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.

摘要

在当代数字时代，用户可能会在不知道后果的情况下采取可能影响其隐私和安全的行为。知道后果，可能被视为高于基本操作技能的更高级别的可用性。这种现象主要是用户知识与数字系统复杂性之间差距的直接结果。掌握这些系统的能力被称为技术素养，因此这是保护隐私和安全的关键因素。然而，获得技术素养的过程是昂贵的，而且并非微不足道。在这项研究中，我们用定性方法解决了这个问题，并引入了一种名为 OTLA（优化技术素养获得）的方法，以实现教学过程成本与其收益之间的最优。n  = 320 名参与者讨论五个技术素养问题，并表明可以找到该问题的最佳解决方案。因此，OTLA 对保护数字世界中用户的隐私和安全做出了重大贡献。