IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014 - 55

to foreign news content, which is
filtered in seven countries. The data
analysis performed by in-country
experts regarding the frequency
of blocking also indicated differences in user community awareness of these types of activities.
Some user communities were not
paying much attention, and don't
have knowledge about the ongoing
monitoring and blocking activities.
The user community survey
response analysis yielded similar
results. Most users (37%) declared
that they "sometimes" notice Internet blocking, 23% said "rarely,"
only 20% "often," and 9% "never"
(see Fig. 1). Firmware updates are
performed by 52% of all users,
but 38% never run any firmware
updates. These answers were considered important because the
newer versions of firmware guarantee better privacy protection.
Application downloads ranked relatively low (3.2 points on a scale of
1="often" to 5="never"), and most
downloaded content and applications were free of charge.
We received some interesting
answers to the question that addressed
users' perception of mobile Internet
filtering and monitoring activities.
The majority of users (24%) believed
that the filtering and monitoring activities were performed by a special state
agency, while another large group of
users (21%) believed that the blocking
and monitoring activities were regulated by law. Other answers pointed
a finger at other blocking/monitoring
entities (Fig. 2).
When respondents were asked to
select which entity they would entrust
with the protection of their privacy,
most gave the highest score to an ISP
outside their country, and the lowest
to the government and state agencies
within the country. However there
were some exceptions. Generally,
we could say that the distribution
of responses from the 10 countries
suggested that the trust of the listed
entities was balanced. Exceptions
became apparent only after a detailed
data analysis per country. The user

communities in the countries with
vibrant, competitive, profitable, and
highly developed mobile markets
with strong demand for services
have shown the least concern for
strong governmental regulation and
content filtering or blocking. On the
other hand, these same communities,
namely the user communities from
China, Saudi Arabia and the Sultanate of Oman, have shown the highest
level of awareness that the Internet
content blocking is implemented by a
specialized state-owned agency. The
statistics are presented on Fig.2.
We have also observed differences in the level of skills present
in different user communities. The
level of skills in user communities
in some of the participating countries is very high; 89% of respondents from China, 90% from Saudi
Arabia, and 92% from the Sultanate of Oman consider themselves
intermediate or advanced users.
In other countries the user level of
skills appeared rather low; 63% of
Vietnamese and 52% of Syrian and
Iranian users are beginners. The
user level of skills in Uzbekistan
and Tunisia is somehow higher
than in the other countries in the
region (Fig. 3).
Observation also showed that
most users from developed markets are very active in downloading content and applications (3.6
points on a scale from 1 (never) to
5 (frequent) and firmware updates
(between 61% and 71%). These
users declared that content blocking
or filtering of a particular subject or
web site is present and noticeable.
Most users answered that content
blocking is performed by a specialized governmental agency (35%
to 45%) and that this is an activity
regulated by law (15%).
Our findings regarding the trustrelated issues have shown differences from one country to another.
In Oman and Saudi Arabia users
trust their governments, their state
agencies and the ISPs inside their
countries. In China, the governmental and state agencies ranked

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2014

high on the list of trusted mobile
communication privacy protection
providers, if we excluded the "I
do not know" answers. However,
the picture is different if we take
into account the "I do not know"
answers; in that case, the preference is given to the commercial
organizations inside and outside
China. Most users (49% - 55%)
in Iran, Syria, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan do
not upgrade their firmware. They
are also less interested in application downloads (2.4 to 3.0 points
on a 1 (never) to 5 (often) scale);
this could also be due to the found
lower level of skills.
The question about the entity
implementing content filtering and
traffic blocking also yielded some
interesting results; the choice of
entity ranged from sophisticated
monitoring equipment managed by
investigation teams (17% to 20%) to
legislation (15% to 24%) and proactively trained investigative teams
(13%). But in the three wealthiest
countries with developed markets,
the users identified as most responsible for blocking the specialized
state owned agency in whom they
trust. In Azerbaijan, Vietnam, Syria,
and Uzbekistan users only trust an
ISP outside the country to protect
their privacy. In these four countries
the government and the governmental agencies are not perceived as
trustworthy entities at all.
Parameters that Influence Users'
Understanding of Privacy
The data collected were later processed with the statistical packages
that have identified independent limited numbers of factors on a country
level, such as the Gross National
Income (GNI) of the country, market penetration, state religion, and
affordability of mobile broadband
packages. A significant correlation
was found between the GNI, market penetration, and the wealth of
a country and privacy awareness.
Other factors at the user level, such
as mobile Internet user skills and
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