Assessing and priming pre-service teachers’ attitudes about online privacy and their protection strategies for social networks, email and cloud storage

ABSTRACT With the ubiquity of digital media, managing personal data has become part of our daily lives. Teachers have to manage not only their own data, they also manage students’ sensitive data and furthermore have to teach data protection to students. In Switzerland, teacher education colleges have hence started to educate students about privacy and data protection. To do this effectively, it is important to understand pre-service teachers’ attitudes about online privacy and to assess their knowledge about protection strategies. Therefore, we tested whether existing scales for attitudes (perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, self-efficacy) about online privacy in social networks can be applied to pre-service teachers and be extended to e-mail and cloud storage. We then explored how these attitudes relate to protection strategies. Except for perceived vulnerability regarding social networks, we succeeded in reliably measuring the three different attitudes in the three domains. Priming did not change the attitudes. However, we did find that self-efficacy was related to the degree to which students report using data protection strategies. This suggests that to motivate pre-service teachers to engage in data protection, teaching them these strategies is more effective than making them more aware of their vulnerability and the severity of data breaches.