A STUDY OF PERCEPTION OF DATA PRIVACY RISKS IN CLOUD-BASED ACADEMIC PLATFORMS

Abstract

Academic platforms like Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams for Education, and Moodle are cloud-based education tools that have quickly reshaped the education sector, allowing students and teachers of various fields and educational institutions to engage in digital learning without any physical interaction. Nonetheless, this move towards cloud-based academic systems has brought a lot of concern over the privacy and security of sensitive student data. Although these platforms have gained widespread use, little empirical data has been studied to determine how university students both technical and non-technical understand the risk of data privacy in their daily use of cloud-based tools in their academic activities. This research paper explores the views of students with various academic backgrounds in Pakistani universities regarding the risks of data privacy. The study evaluated knowledge of the risks of information privacy, level of trust in institutional data handling, personal perceptions of vulnerability, and respondent reactions to privacy risks in both IT and non-IT areas of expertise. The results show that students tend to be moderately aware of the risks of privacy but have low levels of awareness of institutional data protection policies, and that privacy risk awareness is positively related to the display of protective behavior. Digitally more literate students are more likely to report stronger privacy-protecting intentions regarding their behavior, regardless of the major they study. The paper finds that higher education institutions need to enhance their data privacy communication practices, integrate open data governance models, and embed digital privacy literacy into all academic programs to deal with the increasing risks of cloud-based academic environments.