Educating Students’ Privacy Decision Making through Information Ethics Curriculum

Increasingly sophisticated technologies nowadays have equipped powerful capabilities to obtain and exploit consumers’ information privacy on the Internet. The contemporary privacy protection techniques seem fail to guard information privacy. Besides of the technological protections, information ethics education is described as the ideal way to increase people’s consciousness. This study proposes a privacy decision making model which posits that attitudes toward privacy protection, privacy self-efficacy for protection, and privacy self-efficacy for non-acquisition are critical factors essential to behavioral intention. Further, a longitudinal model explores whether information ethics education plays a role in influencing students’ concepts of protecting information privacy. A survey of 111 senior-level undergraduate students in the department of Information Management was conducted to test the hypothesized model. The findings exhibit important insights: through information ethics education, students demonstrate significant model paths changes in the relationships of attitude, privacy self-efficacy for protection, and privacy self-efficacy for nonacquisition to intention. The implications to the ethics curriculum concerning information privacy are discussed.