ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Media Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Citizenship in the New Era of Social MediaView all 21 articles
Privacy Paradox and Privacy Calculus: The Dilemma and Trade-offs of Privacy Protection among Chinese Middle-aged and Elderly under Digital Stress
Provisionally accepted
- 1Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China
- 2Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
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While digitalization brings great convenience to life, it also introduces privacy and security risks, which are especially challenging for the middle-aged and elderly who entered the digital era relatively late. This research is based on focus group discussions with 25 Chinese middle-aged and elderly participants to explore how they view, understand, and manage privacy issues in the context of digitalization. The findings reveal that although these groups exhibit high privacy concerns related to big data, self-expression, and financial risks, their behaviors often reflect a "privacy paradox" due to limited capacity to protect their privacy. This paradox does not arise from indifference or impulsiveness but from digital stress and constrained protective ability, leading to a passive acceptance in practice. Notably, this acceptance is not wholly passive or unconditional; rather, it results from a "privacy calculus" that balances digital stress, risk, and convenience.
Keywords: Privacy, Privacy paradox, the elderly, Privacy calculus, digital stress
Received: 13 Jun 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hao, Pulido and Song. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yi Song
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