Saudi Parents' Security and Privacy Concerns about their Children's Smart Device Applications

In this paper, we investigate Saudi parents' security and 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 security and 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 compare Saudi parents' practices and concerns with those reported by Western (mainly from the UK) and Chinese parents in previous reports. We find interesting patterns and establish new relationships. Furthermore, Saudi and Western parents show higher levels of privacy concerns than Chinese parents. The low level of privacy concerns expressed by Chinese parents even after being informed about possible privacy implications could be related cultural or political reasons. Finally, we tested 14 security and privacy practices and concerns against high vs. low socioeconomic classes (parents' education, technical background, and income) to find whether there are significant differences between high and low classes. Out of 42 tests (14 properties x 3 classes) we find 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 improvements and recommendations, especially for Saudis, which can be used by parents, developers, researchers, regulators, and policy makers.