A Study of South Asian Websites on Privacy Compliance

Abstract

Privacy laws in South Asian countries are still at a nascent stage. Therefore, South Asian websites are susceptible to user privacy violation. This paper presents an assessment of website privacy policies from 10 sectors in the three largest South Asian economies, namely, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Using a manual qualitative analysis on a dataset of 284 popular websites, we assessed the policies based on accessibility, readability, and compliance with 11 privacy principles. Our findings show that overall, the privacy statement accessibility, and privacy compliance of websites from the three countries is low especially in the education, healthcare, and government sectors. Readability is quite low for websites in all 10 sectors of the three countries. Privacy compliance in each country is the highest for the principles of data processing and third-party transfer, whereas it is the lowest for protection of children's data, data retention and portability. Indian websites performed comparatively better amongst the three countries on all three metrics, followed by Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Based on our results, we provide recommendations involving all stakeholders (i.e., website owners, privacy regulators, and users) to help improve privacy protection of user data in South Asia.

Personal data protection compliance assessment: A privacy policy scoring approach and empirical evidence from Thailand's SMEs

“…Numerous studies have examined privacy statements on websites to analyze their content and compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Examples of such studies include investigations into privacy policies on municipal websites in the Netherlands [13] , Chinese city government websites [12] , Portuguese municipal websites [5] , and South Asian websites [14] . These studies have found that privacy statements' availability, findability, and conformity varied greatly.…”

“…Research on privacy policy assessment has been conducted in various regions worldwide, including China [12] , EU [13] , [5] , [10] , and South Asian [14] , from both government [13] , [5] , [12] and business [14] contexts. Previous studies primarily involved surveying websites to evaluate compliance of privacy policies with personal data protection laws in each country based on predetermined privacy principles [5] , [10] , [15] , [13] , [12] , [14] , [16] .…”

“…Research on privacy policy assessment has been conducted in various regions worldwide, including China [12] , EU [13] , [5] , [10] , and South Asian [14] , from both government [13] , [5] , [12] and business [14] contexts. Previous studies primarily involved surveying websites to evaluate compliance of privacy policies with personal data protection laws in each country based on predetermined privacy principles [5] , [10] , [15] , [13] , [12] , [14] , [16] . Methods employed in these studies included interviews [15] and surveys conducted by manual assessment [13] , [12] , [14] , web content analysis [5] , web scraping [10] , machine learning [10] , or application-based analysis [10] , [16] .…”

“…Previous studies primarily involved surveying websites to evaluate compliance of privacy policies with personal data protection laws in each country based on predetermined privacy principles [5] , [10] , [15] , [13] , [12] , [14] , [16] . Methods employed in these studies included interviews [15] and surveys conducted by manual assessment [13] , [12] , [14] , web content analysis [5] , web scraping [10] , machine learning [10] , or application-based analysis [10] , [16] . In these studies, the analysis of privacy policy content was given significant importance in order to determine adherence to required legal aspects.…”

Aplikasi Penghitung Berat Barang Berbasis Web Dengan Metode Naïve Bayes

“…Berdasarkan pada permasalahan tersebut, maka dalam penelitian dirancang dan diimplementasikan sebuah aplikasi cerdas berbasis web yang ditujukan untuk membantu transaksi barang bekas/loak. Website [3]-[5] merupakan bagian dari Teknologi Informasi yang memanfaatkan Internet, yang diciptakan untuk mempermudah manusia dalam pekerjaannya seharihari, meningkatkan produktivitas dan hasil, dan juga mengefisienkan sumber daya manusia sehingga dapat diberdayakan untuk hal lain yang masih membutuhkan tenaga manusia [6]- [8]. Internet telah menjadi sumber yang paling banyak digunakan untuk mencari informasi yang dibutuhkan ia didukung oleh mesin pencari (search engineI) yang memudahkan pengguna mencari halaman-halaman web yang dibutuhkannya.…”