Academic Integrity in a Digital Age

In academic research and higher learning institutions the need for personal information privacy is of importance. Reasons being that when doing research we collect data in most cases to people and in most cases of an aspect that is confidential. It is this reason we need research clearance and an ethics declaration. But what is information privacy? As we all know, rights to information privacy is among the important civil rights. The right to privacy is characterized with the right to be alone. However, in this digital era, we can realize that privacy is no longer about being alone. Privacy is about which information is being collected and what is happening to it, having choices on how it is collected and being confident that it is secure when used. According to Ahmetoglu and Khedher (2015) the abundance of information and poor knowledge of users about privacy led results to poor use of information and hence a need of educating people about privacy issues and related risk factors become essential. Information or data privacy underlines the relationship between data collection and dissemination, technology, public privacy expectation, as well as the political and legal issues pertaining to them. For instance, it is possible to monitor, log and record web behaviours and the patterns used by people who access the internet in emailing and general surfing among others. According to Ermakova et al (2015) and Sharari and Faqir (2014) information privacy training sessions are important for users so that can effectively use the information including in the health sector. The widespread use of electronic communications–or eCommunications technologies in the twenty-first century is profoundly affecting how we work, play and interact with one another and as such became an integral part of our lives and make us more borderless, truly global world (Bohaker, Austin,Clement & Perrin, 2015). Personal information privacy calls for acceptable policies need to be made available for such internet users, so that administrators of higher education institutions have a more clearly defined function in the monitoring of the internet usage. Thus Information privacy, or data privacy (also known as data protection), is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, and the legal and political issues surrounding them.