# Privacy Policy Analysis of Banks and Mobile Money Services in the Middle East
## 3 Related Work  
In this section, we present the literature that is most relevant to this research. We first discuss the existing studies that have analyzed the privacy policies of financial institutions in the West and the Middle East with regard to compliance with applicable laws and regulations. Next, we discuss existing work evaluating the readability of privacy statements of financial institutions.  
Privacy compliance by financial institutions in the West has been widely explored. For instance, [PERSON] et al. [25] evaluated privacy the notices of 6191 U.S. financial institutions regarding data-sharing practices, opt-out of data sharing, and the collection of personal information stated in the privacy policy. Their findings indicated that large institutions are more likely to share consumers' personal information with third parties for marketing reasons. Similarly, [PERSON] et al. [9] evaluated the privacy policies of 54 mobile money services from 32 countries. They compared the privacy compliance of these applications with that of the top 50 U.S. financial institutions that have a well-established regulatory structure. The privacy statements of the mobile money services and US banks were evaluated against the 11 principles from GSMA and FDIC regulations demonstrating that overall banks have better compliance compared to the mobile money services.  
The literature on privacy compliance in the Middle East is scarce. The existing studies on this topic show that privacy policy availability in e-commerce and e-government websites in the Middle East is low. [PERSON] et al. [11] evaluated the privacy policies of 183 e-commerce websites in Gulf Cooperation Council countries against the Federal Trade Commission's Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPs). They found that 73.2% of these websites had no privacy policy available. Similarly, [PERSON] et al. [10] evaluated the privacy policies of 54 e-government websites in Saudi Arabia against FIPs and found that 72% websites did not have a privacy policy. In addition, 40% of the websites that had a privacy policy supplied with two or less of the five privacy principles. We add to this literature by studying the privacy compliance of Middle Eastern banks and mobile money services.  
Several studies have investigated the readability of privacy statements of financial institutions. For instance, [PERSON] et al. [26] evaluated the readability of privacy policies of financial institutions (25 banks) and compared them to policies of companies offering financial services (25 check cashing companies and 25 credit counseling companies) using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score. They found that the average reading grade levels are above 12 for privacy policies of all three business sectors. [PERSON] et al. [9] calculated the readability of privacy statements from banks and mobile money services using the Flesch-Kincaid score, showing that mobile money policies, on average, seemed harder to understand compared to their traditional banking peers. Similarly, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [27] estimated that an average American Internet user needs to spend 201 h per year to read the privacy policies of all the websites they have visited. Our work extends these studies by measuring the readability of the privacy statements of Middle Eastern banks and mobile money services.