Privacy policy evaluation: a comparative study on universities of Saudi Arabia and the United States

Abstract

With the growing awareness of the importance of protecting user information online, the need for websites to include comprehensive privacy policies is more important than ever. It is more important that the policy is accessible, fully understandable by the potential users, and compliant with established regulatory framework such as the FIPs. This dissertation compared ease of access, readability, and FIPs compliance of privacy policies of higher education institutions between Saudi Arabia (SA) and the United States (US). Privacy policies from seventy-eight public and private universities were collected and analyzed. The selection criteria were based on size, number of students, and the number of majors. Qualitative analyses of Chi-Square tests as well as quantitative analysis of ANOVA were conducted on the data of the two samples of the privacy policies from both SA and US schools. This study was the first of its kind to shed light on the evaluation of privacy policies in SA and US higher educational institutions from the comprehensive scope of accessibility, readability, and content coverage. The results showed that the availability of the privacy policies were different between SA and US schools. However, the privacy policy accessibility in terms of number of clicks, search readiness, and document format were comparable between the two samples of policies. Furthermore, comparison of readability measured with FGL scores indicates that the SA school privacy policies were similar to those of US schools. Finally, no statistically significant discrepancies were identified on compliance with the FIPs framework between the privacy policies of SA and US.