Online Privacy Literacy Scale (OPLIS)
Empirical research has revealed disparities of internet users online privacy attitudes and online privacy behaviors. Although users express concerns about disclosing personal data on the Internet, they share personal and sometimes intimate details of their and others lives in various online environments.
This may possibly be explained by the knowledge gap hypothesis which states that people are concerned about their privacy and would like to behave accordingly, but that lacking privacy literacy prevents them from reacting the ways that they think would most adequately reflect their attitudes and needs. Based on this rationale, we wanted to investigate the role of online privacy literacy with regard to users' implementation of data and privacy protection strategies. As a first step, we developed an objective and validated instrument for measuring online privacy literacy.
You can find more information on the project website: www.oplis.de
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The scale is copyrighted but you are free to use it without permission as long as you give credit to the authors of the scale by citing the forthcoming article in the journal "Diagnostica". You can download a translated version of the scale here:
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Related publications
Masur, P. K., Teutsch, D. & Trepte, S. (2017). Entwicklung und Validierung der Online-Privatheitskompetenzskala (OPLIS). Diagnostica. doi: 10.1026/0012-1924/a000179
Trepte, S., Teutsch, D., Masur, P. K., Eicher, C., Fischer, M., Hennhöfer, A., Lind, F. (2015). Do people know about privacy and data protection strategies? Towards the "Online Privacy Literacy Scale" (OPLIS). In. S. Gutwirth, R. Leenes & P. de Hert (Eds.). Reforming European Data Protection Law. (pp. 333-365). Springer Netherlands. doi:10.1007/978-94-017-9385-8 (Link | PDF)