PROTECTION OF ONE’S OWN PERSONAL DATA – CONCEPTUALISATION AND MEASUREMENT

The main objective of the article is to conceptualise and operationalise a variable relating to a setof actions in all fields of human activity that reduce the risk of unauthorised use of personal data.In contrast to the approach focusing exclusively on technical ways of securing data, the proposedconstruct refers to a general reasonable caution in the disposal of one’s own personal data excludingtechnical aspects. Commitment to protecting one’s own personal data was operationalised usingthe author’s validated index. The high reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.85) predisposesthe developed tool for use in research on personal data security. In addition, a factor analysis wascarried out in the article, allowing a rejection of the hypothesis that the variable in question hasat least two independent dimensions, each of which includes activities carried out in the real orvirtual world.