The Effect of Stressful Life Events on Online Privacy Protective Behavior of Israeli Students

ABSTRACT This exploratory study investigates the influence of stressful life events on privacy‐protective behavior. We examine the effects of the ongoing state of war in Israel on the rate of deliberate falsification of personal details during website registration, in a user study of 107 students at Israeli universities. The students were queried using a quantitative method in online closed‐ended questionnaires. This research builds on our previous work (Weinberger & Bouhnik, 2021) examining the effects of other stressful life events, specifically the COVID‐19 pandemic, on the privacy‐protective behavior of Israeli students. We found that distrust of website operators and the desire to remain anonymous are the most common reasons for identity falsification. In addition, our analysis showed that the greater the concern over privacy, the more likely identity falsification was to occur. The Israel‐Hamas War in Israel seems to have exacerbated privacy concerns among online users, in turn increasing the tendency of users to exhibit privacy‐protective behavior.