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.
