The Impact of using Mobile Phones on Privacy of Students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

In this study, we aimed at exploring the current practices of using
mobile phones by students in Saudi Arabia and identifying the
potential data privacy risks that they are exposed to. The key
findings from the study was that although a majority of students
are aware of data privacy, many of the respondents were willing
to chat with unknown people online and a considerable number
of those participants opened URLs sent from strangers. This is a
huge data privacy risk since it may result in the disclosure of
their personal information without the knowledge that the
websites were deceptive sites that posed a threat to their personal
data, which led to several risks to their personal data, such as
theft of personal accounts, identity cards, information, and
personal photos. Based on the finding and due to the lack of
research and commercial efforts of detecting malicious URLs on
mobile devices, we developed a system, Suspicious URL
Detector, which is targeted to support mobile users to seamlessly
verify URLs before they can be opened. Our system is composed
of a mobile app and a URL verification server that is backed by
PhishTank [1], a user-contributed blacklist of suspicious URLs.
The mobile app is also designed to be user-friendly and
lightweight to ensure it performs well on mobile devices with
limited resources.