Think online overshare is just for kids? Turns out older users are just as bad

When you think about the amount of information we’re willing to give online services, it’s kind of scary. I mean would you tell a stranger on the side of the road what your date of birth is, never mind where you live, what you like to eat and what your favourite movie is?

But surely that willingness to share everything about ourselves is something mostly younger people are plagued with right? I mean surely older people, the ones who fostered the notion of “stranger danger” within us as children would be more careful online, right?

Um, no. According to new research from online security specialist McAfee, as reported by eMarketer, 97% of US adults ages 50 to 75 go online daily.

While the vast majority of them use the internet for fairly mundane tasks, such as paying bills or settling accounts, they’ve also gone in for social media in a big way. The top social network among this age group, as is to be expected, is Facebook. Three-quarters of people within the group report using the site compared to a paltry 35% and 22% using Google+ and Twitter, respectively.

It also turns out that they’re just as capable of getting into trouble on social media as younger people are, especially with regards to the information they share online.

According to the research, two out of three readily share contact information. There is however an apparently large discrepancy between the likelihood of sharing something like an email address (55%) and a more traceable detail like a cellphone number (33%) or home address (25%).

Those numbers are especially interesting given that nearly three-quarters of people aged between 50 and 75 claim to be aware of online threats and feel that having a social network account puts them at increased risk.

It’s unclear how different the stats would be in emerging market countries where many older people will have only come online relatively recently. For many in the US and developed countries like it, the web will have started out as an almost entirely benevolent force.

Anyone coming online in the past few years though, may have been warned of the potentially malevolent pitfalls of the web from the get go. On the other hand, they may not have been and children will be receiving calls from their parents about having “deleted the internet” for years to come.