Droppie [infosec] 🐨
Turn on MFA. Sign this PDF. CRN number? Password incorrect. Swipe up. Scroll down …For many elderly Australians, dealing with today’s digital world has become a nightmare.
Stephanie Wood:
“So,” my mother says, with steely intent. “I need your help.” She is visiting from interstate, cornering me while she can. She pulls out a notebook and pen. I sit beside her at the kitchen table, try to summon patience and goodwill, and wait. “How do I send photographs from my phone?” she asks.
Mum is 89. On her own, unassisted, she flew from Queensland, where she lives independently in a house with many stairs. She can get a plumber out to repair a leaky tap but doesn’t know how to pay him online – she’d be gaily writing cheques if anyone still accepted them. She drives to her doctor’s surgery but if reception sends a follow-up text message, it’s unlikely she’ll see it. Her hearing is excellent but when she accidentally turns off her iPhone’s volume (how do you even do that?), it can take a day before she realises and another hour for me to explain over the phone how to get it back on.
More than once, she has rung me in a panic after getting calls from the ATO or other agencies threatening action over allegedly unpaid bills. And emails? In the underground 2024 hit film Thelma, the elderly protagonist asks her grandson, “What’s an inbox?” (right before she is scammed). Mum answers Thelma’s question: “It’s just one more thing to worry about.” She can access hers on her iPad but rarely does. Online shopping? Good grief, no!
So, like millions of other adult children around the country, I have, reluctantly, become my analogue mother’s bookkeeper, tech adviser, online shopper, security guard and remote help desk. “Why has my iPad done this thing?” Mum will ask and, 1000 kilometres away, I’ll try to figure out what “this thing” could possibly be. Or we’ll spend an age trying to reset one of her passwords, failing because the verification code pings to her, not me, and she can’t find it, and we try repeatedly until I’m close to tears and her frustration electrifies the phone line.
But Mum doesn’t know how lucky she is. Her digital trials are inconsequential and, mostly, I solve them or, if I can’t, act on her behalf. Many other older people, especially those who don’t have children or grand-children to call in for help, or for whom English is not their first language, find the digital world they’ve been thrust into alienating, even frightening.
“It makes me angry, disempowered,” Robert Lovett, a 73-year-old inner-Sydney pensioner tells me. “It feels like other people are forcing you to jump through hoops you don’t want to jump through.” Lovett is single and not in the best of health. We sit together at the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre after his twice-weekly gentle exercise class and I ask him who he calls when he’s in trouble, digital or otherwise. “I don’t,” he says. Another man I meet, Colin*, 80, has similar feelings about technology. “To me, it’s not a friend, it’s an enemy and as much as I can, I avoid it,” he says.
I visit Colin, a former architect and planner, at his home south of Sydney, where he lives alone and is recovering from a serious illness. He doesn’t have children. He doesn’t have a home internet connection or a computer. “I don’t want one,” he says defiantly. His access to the world is through his smartphone. He avoids using that, too. He has five television sets around his house on which he watches SBS history documentaries, but asks me what “streaming” is.
Like Robert and Colin, about one in five people are excluded from a world most of us take for granted. The 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index (ADII) found that over-75s, First Nations people and public housing residents are disproportionately excluded. Not to mention those who live in remote and regional areas, where public transport is scarce and bank branches and other in-person services are dwindling in number. For these groups, limited access to digital tools or the skills to use them is an existential issue, banishing them to the fringes of daily life.
“It’s this new kind of disability we’ve created as a result of just how quickly we’ve pivoted to these new platforms,” says Robin Parkin, the CEO of the now-defunct Melbourne-based not-for-profit Lively, which trained young digital natives to offer tech help to older people. “It’s just such an unavoidable part of participating in society now. You need to have some basic digital literacy in order to access essential services … banking, some shopping, or to participate in any kind of community activity.”
Patricia Sparrow, CEO of COTA Australia, the peak advocacy body for older Australians, says the digital revolution has become an issue of equity. Even those who the ADII might count as “included” – people who cope with their devices or who have family support – vent their frustrations to her. “They talk about how everything is digital and how it impacts their daily life as much as ageism does.”
The bombardment comes from all sides, from the ATO and My Aged Care and Centrelink, from insurers, medical institutions and banks (would you like your statements emailed to you and have you downloaded the app?). It lands in the form of passwords and multifactor authentication, security questions and access codes, online forms, uploads and downloads and emailed bills and BPAY and never-ending device updates.
And for older people, the cost of digital ineptitude can far exceed mere frustration. In 2024, Australians aged 65 and over reported losses of nearly $100 million to scammers – the highest loss of any age group. It can also leave them vulnerable to unscrupulous children or caregivers managing their finances and online affairs.
Governments have responded to the digital divide by funding a range of programs, but the response is inadequate in scope and strategic effect. Angela Savage, CEO of Public Libraries Victoria, says it’s “a burning issue” for the sector, with librarians often picking up the slack for government and private-sector organisations. “Device advice, one-on-one tech support, has become bread-and-butter work for libraries; there’s a gap and no one else is filling it,” she says. “In addition to just the sheer volume of workload, we’re also seeing a lot more critical incidents in libraries, because people are venting the frustration that they used to vent on Centrelink workers on library staff.”
A not-for-profit provider of free tech help in the Wollongong area, Living Connected, introduces me to several of its clients, including Colin and John*. I meet John at a local library. He’s seeking damages over a traffic incident and the stream of court forms he’s required to submit online has overwhelmed him. “People say, ‘Have a look online’ and I say, ‘Listen to me, I don’t do online, I’m 71, I wasn’t brought up on computers, never had a job where I used a computer, or nothing like that … so don’t even think about saying that to me.’ I take offence to that.” His rage seems barely contained. John’s only digital access is via his Android phone and the library’s computers. “Everybody around my age hates this computer world. Take me back to the ’70s or the ’80s. Nobody my age wants to deal with this stuff.”
In mid-2024, Cecily Grice joined the Go Gentle organisation and started to investigate the option of voluntary assisted dying for herself. Grice, lean and elegant and looking a decade younger than her 81 years, had been treated for breast cancer the year before, but it wasn’t her own health driving her to consider the method by which she wanted to die: it was her husband Alan’s deteriorating condition. The former obstetrician and gynaecologist had Parkinson’s disease and dementia, was hallucinating and having frequent falls, and the process of getting him into an aged-care facility had been protracted and distressing. “I do not want any member of my family to have to go through the experience of coping with aged-care forms and assessments that I have experienced,” Grice wrote in a diary entry. “[Services say] ‘just go online and …’ which is beyond many aged people who did not grow up with computers.”
Alan, who finally went into care in July 2024, died in mid-October last year. Sitting in a pale leather lounge chair in her neat villa in a community south of Sydney, Grice tells me she would rather curtail her own life if she becomes incapacitated than subject her four children to the experience she endured through Alan’s last years. While they supported her from a distance, Grice bore most of the bureaucratic pain herself. At every step, the need to manage processes digitally added to her trauma. “I was so uptight at one stage when this was all going on that my GP sent me to a psychologist.”
Grice simultaneously needed to communicate online with government bodies including My Aged Care, MyGov, Services Australia and Centrelink, plus banks, health funds and the industry superannuation fund into which she eventually moved the couple’s money. She had a dozen or more reference numbers for various organisations and processes. When Alan was transferred from a respite ward to a dementia ward within the same nursing facility, she had to complete new paperwork with the same questions all over again. One form advised her that she could use autofill to complete the form. “I didn’t have any idea what autofill was.” Grice couldn’t print the form, so stumbled her way through filling it out on her phone. “I had to sign my name with my finger in a space, and didn’t know how to do it. When I did it, it looked nothing like my name.” Eventually she went to a Living Connected drop-in session for assistance. The pain continued even after Alan’s death. Grice had to complete online forms authorising his cremation, but autofill bamboozled her again. In the end, she printed the forms, filled them in by hand, scanned them into her phone and emailed them. It took her a day.
1/3
Queen 1066
Trish Roberts
DragonFlame
Dale Reardon
skua
World news | The Guardian
Mojo ♻️
ABC Feeds