Saudi Parents' Privacy Concerns about Their Children's Smart Device Applications

TL;DR

This study investigates Saudi parents' privacy concerns regarding their children's use of smart device apps, revealing high concern levels, discrepancies with children's app choices, and socioeconomic differences, providing insights for stakeholders.

Contribution

The paper offers new insights into Saudi parents' privacy concerns, comparing them with Western and Chinese parents, and examines socioeconomic factors influencing privacy practices.

Findings

Saudi parents have high privacy concerns but prioritize app content over privacy issues.

Most children's apps are inappropriate for their age and request sensitive data.

Limited socioeconomic differences in privacy concerns suggest a positive trend in digital literacy.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate Saudi parents' privacy concerns regarding their children's smart device applications (apps). To this end, we conducted a survey and analysed 119 responses. Our results show that Saudi parents expressed a high level of concern regarding their children's privacy when using smart device apps. However, they expressed higher concerns about apps' content than privacy issues such as apps' requests to access sensitive data. Furthermore, parents' concerns are not in line with most of the children's installed apps, which contain apps inappropriate for their age, require parental guidance, and request access to sensitive data such as location. We also discuss several aspects of Saudi parents' practices and concerns compared to those reported by Western (mainly from the UK) and Chinese parents in previous reports. We found interesting patterns and established new relationships. For example, Saudi and Western parents show higher levels of privacy concerns than Chinese parents. Finally, we tested 14 privacy practices and concerns against high versus low socioeconomic classes (parents' education, technical background, and income) to find whether there are significant differences between high and low classes (we denote these differences by "digital divide"). Out of 42 tests (14 properties x 3 classes) we found significant differences between high and low classes in 7 tests only. While this is a positive trend overall, it is important to work on bridging these gaps. The results of this paper provide key findings to identify areas of improvement and recommendations, especially for Saudis, which can be used by parents, developers, researchers, regulators, and policy makers.