It began when one of the care home residents I look after asked me to take her picture for her Facebook account. Harmless enough – until I noticed the photo had been requested by Michael Bublé. The messages were affectionate and convincing and before long she was being asked for personal information.
I had to find a way to gently break it to her that this was very unlikely to be Mr Bublé, which led to tears, disbelief and embarrassment. In the end, I blocked the scammer on her account – along with several other suspicious profiles. The Mental Capacity Act’s third principle states that everyone has the right to make a bad decision. However, it’s best to stop such things before we start discussing the law.
This story isn’t unusual. Fraudsters know that older people are often more trusting, more likely to be lonely and less likely to spot the warning signs of online scams. According to the charity Independent Age, nearly three in five people aged 65 or older say they’ve been targeted by a scam, and among those who were scammed the average loss was nearly £4,000. Collectively, older people in the UK have been defrauded of an estimated £7.4 billion. About one-third say their mental health suffered as a result.
Now, a new wave of residents is arriving in care homes with iPads, smartphones, and laptops. And with them come new dilemmas. How do you manage passwords for someone with dementia? How far should staff assist with online shopping? What if a gentleman insists on browsing pornography? And what about the risk that it isn’t anonymous fraudsters exploiting residents, but staff themselves?
These are not just technical questions – they are ethical ones. The Mental Capacity Act talks about ‘best interests’, but who decides what’s in someone’s best interest when it comes to browsing the web? Block too much and you look like Big Brother; allow too much and you risk harm. The answer lies in a balance – but one that will be very hard to get right.
There are rules for everything in care homes – from how hot the bath should be to how often the fire alarm is tested. But there are no national standards on digital safeguarding. The guidance tends to be general (safeguarding from abuse, data security) rather than aimed at the emerging challenges of residents who are digitally connected and vulnerable.
That gap will soon become even larger. Within two decades, care homes will be full of people who grew up with computers; in 50 years, they’ll be full of people who have lived their entire lives online – each with dozens of accounts, social media histories, cloud storage and digital assets. Managing this digital baggage will be more complicated than storing glasses and dentures; while our current generation of pensioners are complaining of banks that have moved online, soon care homes will be full of people managing cryptocurrency wallets.
On paper, digital connection should be a triumph. Video calls stave off loneliness; online banking and shopping restore independence; social media offers stimulation. But the benefits come wrapped in danger. In ordinary households, an older person can lean on younger relatives for help. In a care home, that responsibility falls to staff. Which is why the care sector needs a framework for digital safeguarding – and fast.
Every part of life has gone online. It will be our responsibility to treat digital care as part of care itself
There are things we could do. Care homes could appoint ‘digital champions’, training staff in cyber safety and running scam-awareness sessions for residents. Banks and tech companies could be pressed to design systems with the vulnerable in mind – interfaces that make scams harder to pull off and easier to spot or report.Perhaps they need to allow powers of attorney to more easily inherit social media or transfer control of online accounts. Regulators should begin setting standards for real online safety. Care homes will need digital-safeguarding policies as robust as their medication ones – every login, password or payment accessed by staff logged, witnessed and reviewed. Perhaps, in time, services will even have to apply Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards to restrict access to passwords, or hold best-interests meetings to address screen addiction.
Every part of life has gone online. It will be our responsibility to treat digital care as part of care itself. If all this sounds bleak, it gets worse. Artificial intelligence promises to make deception slicker than ever. Imagine a resident receiving a phone call that sounds exactly like their son, urgently asking for money. Or a video that appears to show a trusted charity worker. Deepfakes and voice clones aren’t science fiction – they’re already here. Combine those with memory loss and things get much, much worse.
A carer’s role can only go so far and families, too, will need to be part of this picture – co-managing devices, agreeing safe words, holding recovery passwords and helping monitor for scams. But that raises its own problems: sons and daughters may one day have to police their parents’ browsing habits.
But the answer is not despair, the answer may be the same as ever: talk. Regular communication between residents, families and staff about what’s real and what to do if something feels wrong will be the key. Digital safety, like any other kind, begins with trust. The real test of care in the digital age will be this: whether we can protect people from harm without stripping them of autonomy. Dignity doesn’t mean letting someone be scammed, nor does it mean cutting them off from the outside world.
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