How Increased Awareness Can Impact Attitudes and Behaviors toward Online Privacy Protection

Abstract

People on the Web are generating and disclosing an ever-increasing amounts of data, often without full awareness of who is recording what about them, and who is aggregating and linking pieces of data with context information, for a variety of purposes. Awareness can help users to be informed about what silently happens during their navigation while learning from disclosure of personal information may help to discriminate potential harmful activities from daily and regular activities that can be performed online. Our main objective is to study whether a highly customized tool can help users to learn the value of privacy from their behaviors and make informed decisions to reduce their degree of exposure. To this aim, we present an evaluation study to analyze general perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs about privacy online, and to explore the resultant behaviors for two different groups of participants from an academic environment. Results show that users from the ICT field (Information and Communication Technology) are less concerned than non-ICT ones (i.e., not technological-oriented students), and that skill and expertise can influence the perception of the risks as well as the corresponding behaviors. Finally, students with less expertise in the ICT field learned more than the others, by showing greater willingness to adopt technologies to protect their privacy online.