Cyberheroes: The Design and Evaluation of an Interactive Ebook to Educate Children about Online Privacy

Abstract

We designed an educational interactive ebook called Cyberheroes and evaluated it to assess its effectiveness at increasing children’s online privacy knowledge and behaviour, and supporting child-parent privacy-related discussions. We con- ducted a user study with 22 children (aged 7 to 9) and 22 parents that included usability evaluations and privacy knowledge and behaviour assessments with children pre/post-reading and 1-week later. Cyberheroes considerably increased children’s online privacy knowledge and reported privacy behaviour, and led to superior 1-week knowledge retention compared to the text-only control. Fur- thermore, Cyberheroes facilitated longer child-parent privacy discussions during co-reading than the control. Children and parents found Cyberheroes engag- ing, easy to use, and easy to learn. We discuss our interactive ebook’s role in children’s acquisition, retention, and transfer of knowledge, and the role that in- teractivity, previous knowledge, and parental guidance play in children’s online privacy education.