Generation Z’s [Incoherent] Approach Toward Instagram’s Privacy Policy

Social Networking Sites have not only become a dominant means of communication and information worldwide, but also a strategic source for cybercriminals to exploit users’ personal information. This occurs when, for marketing purposes, online activities such as browsing and shopping, generate data for the algorithm to analyze and possibly interfere with users’ on a daily basis, raising concerns about the users’ privacy and data vulnerability. Therefore, this study carries out an analysis of Generation Z’s awareness of the privacy policy (PP) terms and the vulnerability of their personal data, with particular emphasis on Instagram’s PP, since this platform, due to its popularity, is now one of the most renowned networking tools, especially for younger generations. Thus, herein was constructed an online survey, which contained both demographic and social media questions, in order to collect data to analyze users’ perceptions on this topic, having a sample comprised by 222 answers. The proposed study revealed that although 89.6% of the participants did not read Instagram’s PP, only 21.2% of the respondents are not concerned about how their data is used by Instagram. Finally, this study reflects on the users’ possible inertia towards reading the PP agreement, concluding that even if most of the respondents show concerns about the use of their personal data, they are not engaged in obtaining more information on how they can protect their data by reading the PP terms, thus revealing an incoherent posture as well as a dependency on Instagram. The Chi-square test of association was also applied to the data and various statistically significant associations were found, suggesting some incoherent behaviors, at the 5% level.