A study of IT education’s impact on individuals’ vulnerability, awareness, concerns and behavior towards privacy policies.

Abstract: Privacy has become an increasingly important topic with the expanding amount of private information created as a result of social media and online services which are prevalent in our society today. If the large amount of private information that now exists on the internet is not handled correctly people will be vulnerable to cybercrimes. Although, in order to handle the information in a proper way social media- and online service providers generally have a privacy policy in place which regulates how providers may use the users’ personal information. The purpose of this study is to examine whether there exists a behavioral difference between individuals with IT education and individuals without IT education concerning the usage of privacy policies. More specifically, the aim is to analyze individuals’ vulnerability, awareness, behavior and concerns relating to privacy policies and to investigate if the privacy paradox is more present for one of the subgroups. The research was conducted by means of a survey distributed in multiple Facebook groups, it was open for 7 days and 224 individuals participated and gave their answers to all the survey questions. The answers were then analyzed with SPSS and SmartPLS. The results of this study show that for the group of participants with an IT education there exists multiple positive relationships, namely awareness of privacy policies and information privacy information concerns have a positively relationship with privacy protecting behavior. And perceived vulnerability to privacy risks has a positive relationship with an individual's information privacy concerns. However, for the non ITeducated individuals there only exists one positive relationship, the one between information privacy concerns and privacy protecting behavior. Moreover, it was found that the privacy paradox is not present for any of the two groups. Although, the ITeducated individuals are more aware than the non-IT-educated but nevertheless are their behaviors the same.