State of Security and Privacy Practices of Top Websites in the East African Community (EAC)
This highlights critical privacy gaps for EAC citizens, urging lawmakers to enact stronger data protection regulations as technology adoption grows.
The study analyzed security and privacy practices of 169 top East African Community (EAC) websites, finding that only 75% have privacy policies and only 16% of third-party tracking companies are disclosed in these policies, with most tracking related to advertising from outside the EAC.
Growth in technology has resulted in the large-scale collection and processing of Personally Identifiable Information by organizations that run digital services such as websites, which led to the emergence of new legislation to regulate PII collection and processing by organizations. Subsequently, several African countries have recently started enacting new data protection regulations due to recent technological innovations. However, there is little information about the security and privacy practices of top websites serving content to EAC citizens. We, therefore, analyze the website operators' patterns in terms of third-party tracking, security of data transmission, cookie information, and privacy policies for 169 top EAC website operators using WebXray, OpenSSL, and Alexa top websites API. Our results show that only 75 percent of the analyzed websites have a privacy policy in place. Out of this, only 16 percent of the third-party tracking companies that track users on a particular website are disclosed in the site's privacy policy statements which means that users don not have a way of knowing which third parties collect data about them when they visit a website. Such privacy policies take time to read and are difficult to understand; on average, it takes a college graduate to comprehend the policy and a user spends 12 minutes to read the policy. Additionally, most third-party tracking on EAC websites is related to advertisement and belongs to companies outside the EAC. This means that EAC lawmakers need to enact suitable laws to ensure that people's privacy is protected as the rate of technology adoption continues to increase.