Current Key Privacy Factors: Development and Analysis

Privacy in information technology is a critical topic for all practitioners. This study measures the current state of information technology privacy by a series of nine current computer related ethical privacy issues. The study surveys a broad cross-section of 219 students, faculty, and professionals and determines their recognition of an ethical issue for each individual topic. The study next reviews the development of overall privacy factors from the selected topics. Privacy is a complex concept that defies definition in a single variable. Separate and distinct privacy factors are required to properly include multi-faceted privacy concerns. Three distinct privacy factors are uncovered, Internet Mischief, Personal Privacy, and Workplace Privacy. They all achieve acceptable Cronbach’s alpha ranging from.7424 to.9206. After the factor development, demographic variances are also analyzed uncovering some significant variances by gender, age, student status, and faculty/staff compared to practitioners. The study concludes with a review of the implications and limitations of the study