Abstract
Privacy compliance of the Middle East’s financial sector has been relatively unexplored. This paper evaluates the privacy compliance and readability of privacy statements for top banks and mobile money services in the Middle East. Our analysis shows that, overall, Middle Eastern banks have better privacy policy availability and language distribution, and are more privacy compliant compared to mobile money services. However, both the banks and mobile money services need to improve (1) compliance with the principles of children/adolescent’s data protection, accountability and enforcement, and data minimization/retention, and (2) privacy statement texts to be comprehensible for a reader with ~8 years of education or less.
Highlights
Overall, Middle Eastern banks have better privacy policy availability and language distribution, and are more privacy compliant compared to mobile money services
McDonald and Cranor [27] estimated that an average American Internet user needs to spend 201 h per year to read the privacy policies of all the websites they have visited. Our work extends these studies by measuring the readability of the privacy statements of Middle Eastern banks and mobile money services
We evaluate the privacy policies of top 25 Middle Eastern banks and 30 mobile money services against the same 11 principles to have an objective basis of comparison
Summary
Banks and Mobile Money Services in the Middle East. Mobile money services enable users, especially those without a bank account to request/transfer money, and make bill payments etc. Any organization that collects personally identifiable information from its users is required to provide an accessible privacy policy for the end-users, usually through a link in the footer section of the website/app’s landing page. Note: In the remainder of the paper, we use the terms privacy policy, privacy statement, and privacy notice interchangeably
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