Investigation of the university students' online privacy awareness in terms of certain variables

The purpose of this study is to investigate the online privacy awareness of university students in terms of individual and intervention factors. The human aspects of the information security model were adopted as the conceptual framework. The causal-comparative research design was used to answer the research questions and the convenience sampling strategy was used to select the participants. The participants of the study are 552 students of the two public universities. The data were collected in the spring semester of 2019-2020 academic year by using demographics information form, "Online Privacy Awareness Scale", "Digital Literacy Scale", and "Virtual Environment Interpersonal Trust Scale". The collected data were analyzed through descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test, analysis of variance, Pearson Correlation analysis, and hierarchical regression analysis. The findings firstly indicated that online privacy awareness of the university students is at a high level. Besides, the association of the online privacy awareness with age, digital literacy, virtual environment interpersonal trust, and the usage duration of the internet and mobile devices was found as significant while no significant relationship was found between online privacy awareness and the duration of social media usage. Although female participants have higher scores of online privacy awareness than males, this difference was found as non-significant. Their privacy awareness also significantly varies in terms of their department while no difference was observed in terms of whether their department is related to information and communication technology. As another finding, their privacy awareness does not significantly vary depending on whether they had a previous privacy problem. Finally, it was revealed that the department and digital literacy of the students are the significant predictors of online privacy awareness. The findings of the study were discussed based on the related literature and recommendations were offered for future studies and practice.