In an era of online social networking, the data privacy is becoming on important topic for researchers to explore. To regulate collection, use and processing of personal data, one needs to understand the behavioral attitude of users of internet so that their need for a law can be assessed. Several studies in this regard have been conducted in other parts of the world where data privacy law is in place, but in India the data privacy was not even a right till recently, when Supreme Court of India declared data privacy as part of the fundamental right of privacy in accordance with constitution of India. The present study is a maiden attempt in India to understand the privacy attitude of the Indian users of social networking sites.

Indobarometer, Data Privacy, Privacy Attitudes, Social Networking Sites, SNSs, Human behavior in Cyber Space

[1] H. J. Smith, T. Dinev, and H. Xu, "Information privacy research: an interdisciplinary review," MIS quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 989-1016, 2011. MIS quarterly
[2] A. F. Westin, "Social and political dimensions of privacy," Journal of social issues, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 431-453, 2003.
[3] M. Z. Yao, "Self-protection of online privacy: A behavioral approach," in Privacy Online: Springer, 2011, pp. 111-125.
[4] I. Ajzen, "From intentions to actions: A theory of planned behavior," in Action control: Springer, 1985, pp. 11-39.
[5] I. Ajzen, "The theory of planned behavior," Organizational behavior and human decision processes, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 179-211, 1991.
[6] I. Ajzen and M. Fishbein, "The influence of attitudes on behavior," The handbook of attitudes, vol. 173, no. 221, p. 31, 2005.
[7] R. Gross and A. Acquisti, "Information revelation and privacy in online social networks," in Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society, 2005, pp. 71-80: ACM.
[8] B. Debatin, J. P. Lovejoy, A.-K. Horn, and B. N. Hughes, "Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Con-sequences," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 15, pp. 83-108, 2009. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
[9] F. Stutzman and J. Kramer-Duffield, "Friends only: examining a privacy-enhancing behavior in facebook," in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 2010, pp. 1553-1562: ACM.
[10] Z. Tufekci, "Grooming, gossip, Facebook and MySpace: What can we learn about these sites from those who won`t assimilate?," In-formation, Communication & Society, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 544-564, 2008.
[11] S. Eurobarometer, "359. 2011," Attitudes on Data Protection and Electronic Identity in the European Union, p. 42, 2011.
[12] D. Borsboom, Conceptual issues in psychological measurement. Universiteit van Amsterdam [Host], 2003.
[13] M. Lovelace and P. Brickman, "Best practices for measuring students’ attitudes toward learning science," CBE-Life Sciences Edu-cation, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 606-617, 2013.
[14] A. Agresti, "An introduction to categorical data analysis, 2nd edn. Hoboken," ed: NJ: Wiley-Interscience, 2007.
[15] S. Jamieson, "Likert scales: how to (ab) use them," Medical education, vol. 38, no. 12, pp. 1217-1218, 2004.
[16] H. J. Gardner and M. A. Martin, "Analyzing ordinal scales in studies of virtual environments: Likert or lump it!," Presence: Tele-operators and Virtual Environments, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 439-446, 2007.
[17] H. M. Marcus-Roberts and F. S. Roberts, "Meaningless statistics," Journal of Educational Statistics, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 383-394, 1987.