Privacy literacy and the protection of personal data in the mind of law students

Abstract

With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, the issue of data protection has become more important than ever before. There is no doubt that data, and especially personal data, has significant commercial value. Data protection also raises major issues for the legal profession. With the increasing significance of data protection, the question arises as to whether law students have sufficient knowledge of privacy literacy. Based on the results of empirical research, this study set out to examine the attitudes of current law students to personal data and to determine how seriously they take data protection, particularly how it works in practice, when, for example, they use various kinds of social network sites, as well as to gauge their knowledge of data protection guarantees. The aim of this study is to provide a brief insight, based on the results of in-depth interviews, into the reasons behind the specific privacy literacy gaps revealed by the findings of the preliminary quantitative research. It is anticipated, it should be emphasised, that law students will prove not to be fully aware of how much personal data they may provide about themselves on social network sites. Moreover, identifying personal data through practical examples causes difficulties for law students, such as cookie ID or data on their health. Consequently, the privacy literacy of law students needs to be improved.