Paradoxical Behaviour in Social Media Usage

The Privacy Paradox is a recently emerged phenomenon. It looks at a person’s intention to disclose information and the actual disclosure of information. In this research, we look at the extent of the relationship between the social media behaviour of a student and their attitude towards privacy. With these results, we can conclude whether they show paradoxical behaviour. These results are derived from a questionnaire among information technology students (n=126) and analyzed to extract the extent of the relationships between certain variables. The data analysis showed significant relationships between several variables, none of which indicated paradoxical behaviour among the population. However, it did give way to various interesting relationships. The results indicate paradoxical behaviour to a certain extent, specifically with regards to social media use self-disclosure and information and privacy concerns and privacy settings. Additionally, the research indicates that the higher the educational background of the participant, the less likely they are to exhibit paradoxical behaviour