Generation Z’s [incoherent] Approach Towards Instagram’s Privacy Policy

Social Networking Sites have not only become a dominant means of com-munication and information worldwide, but also a strategic source for cy-bercriminals to exploit users’ personal information. This occurs when, for marketing purposes, online activities such as browsing and shopping, gen-erate data for the algorithm to analyze and possibly interfere with users’ on a daily basis, raising concerns about the users’ privacy and data vulnerabil-ity. Therefore, this paper 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 the younger generations. To analyze users’ perceptions on this topic, da-ta was collected from a sample of this population (222 answers), through an online survey, which contained both demographic information and social media questions. 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 paper 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 infor-mation on how they can protect their data by reading the PP terms, thus revealing an incoherent posture as well a dependency on Instagram.