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

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