RedCapes: the Design and Evaluation of a Game Towards Improving Autistic Children's Privacy Awareness

Autistic children have differences in social communication, making them vulnerable to privacy risks in social contexts. Research on typical development (TD) children’s privacy learning often neglects autistic children’s unique needs. Therefore, our study aims to understand their challenges in learning privacy and design an effective privacy education game for them. We designed a serious game, RedCapes, and recruited 9 autistic children and 6 TD children to evaluate the game. Our findings suggested that RedCapes improved autistic children’s privacy awareness. Compared to TD children, autistic children have more difficulty identifying relevant privacy risk factors and understanding the full consequences of privacy violations. We propose three design implications for future privacy education games for autistic children. Our work contributes: insights into autistic children’s challenges in learning privacy, a serious game prototype for privacy education, and design recommendations for future privacy education games focused on autistic children.