Users’ attitudes towards the “Going Dark” debate

Abstract

This study sought to investigate the attitude and behavior of people toward the issue of privacy and national security. The online survey was carried administered to 243 online users. Participants were randomly assigned to evaluate three statements, namely, “Citizen Privacy takes precedence over national security,” “Governments should have access to all encrypted data,” and “Individual privacy is a human right.” For each statement, we measured participants’ level of agreement using a 5-point Likert scale. Using a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), we examined if privacy attitudes were different among user characteristics such as gender, religions belief, field of study and educational level. The results showed that most people have negative attitude toward government access to private data, but this view is divided along the religious, gender and field of study.