Saudi parents’ privacy concerns about their children’s smart device applications

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 Chinese children have a higher level of autonomy in installing apps on their devices than Western children who mostly request apps installation from their parents. However, there are more Saudi parents who end up uninstalling apps from their children’s devices due to privacy concerns than Western parents. This suggests that parents’ involvement in installing children’s apps is related to a reduced number of uninstallation incidents, which are mostly negatively received by children. Furthermore, 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 × 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.