Investigating the Privacy Policy Adoption among Malaysia E-Government Websites: Towards Conceptualizing the E-Privacy Assessment Framework

Abstract

Malaysia E-government had improved the government services and overcome barriers faced by the public in the offline environment. The government initiatives to safeguard the interest of the public had transcended to include privacy protection. The Personal Data Protection Act 2009 is considered as  one of the initiatives that had been  successfully  passed by  the  Malaysia Government  by April 2010. However, the implementation and governance of the Act is still subjected to minister’s  decision. This study  aims in parallel with the government initiatives by investigating the  adoption of  privacy policy  among the  Malaysia's  egovernment  websites. This study is importance towards examining the  current  level of awareness for the importance for privacy protection being provided for the  public,  before the full  enforcement of the  Act. Samples of 154 websites were selected by using convenient sampling from Malaysia government portal (http://www.malaysia.gov.my), which comprises  of federal and state governments. The evaluation process was done by using personal observation through an adopted indicators of privacy policies from Jamal Maier and Sunder in 2002 by observing the links provided for 'privacy policy statements', 'privacy policy notice' and 'privacy policy'. The study revealed several issues pertaining privacy policy adoption among Malaysia e-government site and highlights few recommendations and future works towards conceptualization of e-privacy assessment framework in Malaysia e-government context.