Sanctity of Digital Privacy and Personal Data during COVID-19: Are Youths Enough Digitally Literate to Deal with it?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has fast-tracked the development of digital applications and inspired everyone to adapt to the technologies to curb the spread of outbreak. As this crisis intensifies, the rapid usage of digital devices and apps has echoed the serious concerns about civil liberties, privacy, and data protection. Considering the situation, this research aimed to explore the internet using habits of the youths of West Bengal, a state in eastern India, during COVID-19. Besides, the paper explored their experiences using various digital applications, and the fundamental digital literacy of them and the safeguards they often take to protect their data from breaches. Thus,the paper presents the results by conducting an online survey among the youths in West Bengal. The result, from 215 participants, highlighted that the increased use of these digital applications has not matched the demand for digital privacy literacy among the young generation of the state. While this pandemic has raised their concerns over digital privacy and data protection, yet they do not undertake any strong protection mechanisms to protect them digitally. Besides, this paper suggests suitable plans to raise awareness among this generation and form a healthy digital citizenship with a proper regulatory framework as it is the need of the hour.