Examining the relationship between high school students' digital footprint awareness and information security awareness

The purpose of this study is to develop a digital footprint awareness scale for high school students and to examine the relationship between digital footprint awareness and information security awareness. Digital footprint is a virtual identity formed on behalf of the individual by tracking all of the individual's behaviours in online environments. With irresponsible internet usage, virtual identity is formed with a negative infrastructure and this virtual identity can appear in different periods of the individual's life and affect the individual negatively. The prerequisite for a positive virtual identity is increased awareness. It is thought that the level of awareness should be known in order to increase awareness. In this context, a digital footprint awareness scale has been developed for high school students. The scale consists of four sub-dimensions. These are personal data sharing awareness, personal data sharing (implementation), social media usage awareness, and social media usage (implementation). In order to examine the relationship between digital footprint awareness and information security awareness, which is the second dimension of the study, the Information Security Awareness Scale for High School Students developed by Güldüren, Çetinkaya, and Keser (2016) was used. Based on result of research, it was seen that the relationship between information security awareness and digital footprint awareness was high. Participants who are aware of the social media usage and data sharing have a high rate of implementation. It has been seen that the lowest relation among the research results is between attacks, threats and privacy.