A Survey of Privacy Awareness and Current Online Practices of Indian Users: Motivating and Mitigating Factors for Improving Personal Information Privacy

Today, users with their smart devices can communicate and access a wide range of services via the Internet to make their life easier. However, loss of privacy is becoming a major issue for architects or policy makers, accelerated by the rapid development of mobile and wireless technologies that eases the collection, storage, sharing, analysis, and manipulation of the individual’s information. The main objective of this paper is to study the privacy perception and awareness of Internet users in an Indian context. Results of comprehensive survey with 297 users are presented, focusing on their perception and awareness towards personal information privacy (PIP). The survey responses show that the user’s perception is noticeably low considering PIP and that the privacy awareness is not the same as their understanding. The results indicate the need for a solution for PIP protection where the users have complete control over their personal information rather than the service providers, along with the establishment of a personal trust manager for building a trust between service providers and the individuals.The motivation and mitigation factors for such a system are analyzed and discussed.