Personal Data Protection: Are GDPR Objectives Being Achieved With Students?

This article looks at the effects of university education in a European context where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) should be conducive to a heightened awareness of personal data and to the knowledge of the issues involved in collecting it. Through a quantitative and comparative analysis, we compared the knowledge, the representations and the practices of information science students with those of students from other disciplines. This comparison led us to different conclusions. Information-communication students are more familiar than others with the GDPR and the possibilities offered to them in terms of personal data control. However, across all disciplines, students have a tendency to accept the conditions under which their data is used without any reservation. A privacy paradox thus emerges, and university education seems powerless to counterbalance interface-induced conditioning and the effects of “consent fatigue”.