Develop safeguards against erroneous online (over)buying by elderly/others vulnerable due to cognitive impairment

[sideshowbarker]

• https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Society/Japan-s-elderly-online-shoppers-running-into-trouble-infographic
• https://vdata.nikkei.com/en/newsgraphics/aging-society/e-commerce/

Unfamiliarity with screen layouts and operating procedures among the elderly leads to a high rate of erroneous orders and other issues… confirmation and warning signs are small and difficult to notice. A system that can detect and limit unusual orders is needed to protect these new “vulnerable shoppers.” … Safeguards for over-orders are needed.

Internet service providers have developed technology to protect vulnerable consumers, mainly minors, by limiting viewing content, time and billing. However, mechanisms to protect the elderly are still in their infancy.

Technology can provide great benefits to the elderly by giving them access to the market, but it also needs to evolve to protect them from risk … develop technology to detect signs of excessive purchasing based on buying patterns.

Note: The bulleted points below are all verbatim quotations from the articles cited above.

Examples of specific problems that occur regularly among elderly users:

• over-ordering by repeatedly pressing the purchase button even after payment
• purchases that were intended to be one-time only, but have turned into subscriptions
• even if elderly shoppers want to cancel their orders, they often give up when they have to do so online

Causes:

• cognitive decline… is another reason the elderly are more likely to encounter problems
• many Alzheimer’s patients repeatedly purchase the same product
• people with Alzheimer's disease are at a high risk of forgetting their most recent activities
• especially serious problem for seniors who live alone, where no one can discover the problem and intervene

Exacerbated by current pandemic:

• with the outbreak of the new coronavirus, the amount of elderly using the internet is set to increase even faster
• the amount those in their eighties spend online on major everyday items has also jumped since April. In June, spending was more than 6,000 yen, a 56% increase from the same month last year.
• for people aged 60 or older, consultations about health food orders increased particularly sharply … a six-fold jump

Data about the scale of the problems, and the rate at which they are increasing:

• consultations related to online shopping at the [Japanese] National Consumer Affairs Center by people aged 60 and older in fiscal 2019 [were] 15 times more than in fiscal 2010
• that is a sharp increase compared to those aged 59 and younger, which increased less than 6 times.
• the number of consultations for internet trouble surpassed those for non-internet issues for the first time
• the World Health Organization predicts that the global number of people with dementia will continue to increase by almost 10 million each year, reaching 150 million people in 2050
• there are nearly 7 million households in Japan which are people aged 65 or older living alone
• those numbers will continue to grow
• the notion that seniors are not familiar with the internet is a thing of the past
  • 50% of those in their sixties were making purchases online
  • even those in their seventies are rapidly shifting to the web, with more than 40% of them making purchases online
  • that number is also close to 20% for those in their 80s
  • for those in their 60s, 70s, and 80 and older, the numbers of online shopping problems have increased 14-18 times over the past nine years

[r12a]

Seems to me we may be able to make a valuable contribution here. What shape would it take? WAI guidelines for app/content developers? Are there mechanisms that can be built in to the technology?

[sideshowbarker]

Seems to me we may be able to make a valuable contribution here. What shape would it take? WAI guidelines for app/content developers?

I suspect there might already be some WAI guidelines for this but regardless I’d hope providing some good up-to-date guidelines for developers on this could be made a priority.

Are there mechanisms that can be built in to the technology?

It seems like a class of problem that it’d be really difficult to develop solutions for that would run just in frontend code — I mean, it’s for me to imagine a new web-platform API that would help solve this. And even as far as the general problem that could be distilled from this, there are of course legitimate cases where people buy the same items repeatedly over time.

I guess the hard part is distinguishing between somebody doing an expected pattern of repeat buying versus an unexpected pattern of repeat buying. And I’d think that would require having some backend logic that does some relatively sophisticated analysis/learning of buying patterns, over time, across a big set of data — which I suppose takes it into the realm of AI and machine learning.

[samuelweiler]

This reminds me of some discussion during the FTC's recent workshop Bringing Dark Patterns to Light.

[samuelweiler]

@ianbjacobs @brewerj @shawna-slh What sorts of W3C-ish solutions might exist in this space? (And if we don't have any, should we close this issue?)

[ianbjacobs]

My sense is that we are unlikely to find support for built-in browser capabilities on this topic. I think that this feels very appropriate for an app / payment system, but that we will not find support for browsers tracking user transaction history.

[brewerj]

@samuelweiler thanks for surfacing this issue. This is a relevant accessibility concern for online purchasing, but whether or not it fits in a browser-facing payments spec is a good question.

@ianbjacobs thanks for your initial assessment that this wouldn't gain browser support. I'm not positive that that's the only question here.

@michael-n-cooper and I are currently brainstorming about this. Michael is suggesting that it might fit in a best practices or impact section for payments. Seeing this section here https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/#accessibility-considerations , this is the type of content that we were indeed hoping for this section. Would you be averse to considering that non-normative addition?

Separately, yes we can also address it at the accessibility guidelines level; however, Payment spec implementers are unlikely to see it there.

[ianbjacobs]

@brewerj, we've recently sent the transition request to publish PR API as a Recommendation. I would probably not support adding text at this point to version 1 of the API, but welcome suggestions to be incorporated into the Editor's draft that continues to evolve.

[brewerj]

hi @ianbjacobs , thanks for being open to some edits down the road. What's your expectation for further evolution of the draft, presumably post-Rec?

[ianbjacobs]

@brewerj, we have a number of 1.1 features we are already planning to integrate. Among them these pull requests: https://github.com/w3c/payment-request/pulls/