Governments and digital platforms are intensifying their use of data collection to enable personalization, analytics, and surveillance. At the same time, ordinary citizens increasingly sense that their privacy is being violated, yet struggle to explain how or why. To investigate this issue, we present the first nationally representative study of Australians’ awareness, confusion, and frustrations regarding digital privacy, consent interfaces, and the Australian Privacy Act. Drawing on a mixed-methods survey of 239 participants, we find that most Australians suspect their data is being misused but cannot identify the mechanisms behind it. More than half admit they “know something is wrong” yet cannot articulate what it is, while fewer than 20% correctly understand practices such as fingerprinting or cross-device tracking. We conceptualize this disconnect as fractured awareness, a socio-technical condition in which users are not only uninformed but misinformed by the very systems meant to protect them. This constitutes a critical socio-technical failure, where system design actively distorts public understanding of digital privacy practices and protections. We benchmark our findings against U.S. studies and show that Australians exhibit higher institutional trust but similar levels of functional confusion, exposing privacy myths that are culturally shaped yet globally persistent. This paper contributes to software engineering by introducing fractured awareness as a requirements–level construct for privacy-aware system design, developing privacy personas (Misinformed Majority, Resigned Skeptics, Aware Activists) as design archetypes, and demonstrating how regulatory opacity, dark-pattern consent mechanisms, and inequitable interfaces generate systemic confusion. We describe key implications for researchers and practitioners, including regulators, technologists, and platform designers, and argue that addressing fractured awareness is essential to restoring public trust and enabling meaningful digital consent.

@inproceedings{paperbot11961,
  title = {Click, Scroll, Consent: Uncovering Australia’s Privacy Knowledge Crisis},
  author = {Omar Haggag and John Grundy and Mohan Baruwal Chhetri},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3786581.3786938}
}