English abstract
Automating government services is often one of the steps toward achieving e-government. Automating services sometimes requires integrating information from
various government entities to improve electronic services' effectiveness, efficiency,
and accessibility. With this, government entities can integrate their data through
electronic channels without being confined by time or location. In the absence of
preventive measures, this could result in privacy violations and data misuse. In contrast,
the government of Oman, for example, has started enacting regulations that protect
information. They require service providers to embed privacy rules and policies into
integrated services' design specifications and architecture to make it a key enabler of
data protection. Furthermore, trust is one of the most critical factors determining a
person's willingness to take advantage of electronic government services, and
protecting personal information can affect trust. Despite its significance, most previous
studies have focused on the factors leading to trusting such services from a theoretical
perspective without considering the technical aspects. Consequently, more effort is
needed in the current debate on the effect of preserving privacy on trust within
integrated e-government services.
Specifically, this study aims to develop a privacy-preserving framework for integrated
e-government services by investigating the challenges of designing an e-government
architecture using the optimal business tool and the most efficient service design
approach to protect privacy from misuse. A literature review indicates some drawbacks
to current privacy frameworks, and most of them preserve privacy abstractly, while
privacy tools are missing. To fill those gaps, this study interviewed 14 experts and
managers involved in the Oman e-government initiative and familiar with integrating
various government entities. The results show a need for some technical,
organizational, and situational requirements (instruments) that can be used to design
the required framework. Additionally, 420 respondents were asked to participate in
this study and were familiar with using e-government services in Oman. Results
indicate that several factors related to protecting personal information from misused
can influence service trust, including privacy lifecycle protection, privacy controls,
impact assessments, and preventive monitoring. Furthermore, the specifications and
designs of each of these instruments have been validated using Q-sorting, reliability,
and normality, and a conceptual framework has been developed after hypothesizing
the correlations between dependent and independent instruments.
Several methods are utilized in this study to assess the proposed framework. An
experimental evaluation is conducted using validated data to test the conceptual
framework as a first method. The results indicate that all instruments in this study
perceive privacy as a factor that positively influences service trust. A second
evaluation method is to apply the proposed framework to one of the government
entities by redesigning one of its key service schemas and testing it with 14 test cases
and 73200 test requests to evaluate the impact of the implementation of the proposed
framework. Results indicate that implementing the framework will enhance service
delivery using less memory, more threads, and fewer request statistics. Lastly, the
framework results have been compared with the most related frameworks. This
comparison shows that the proposed framework is superior to those currently available.
By filling the gaps in the literature, this study contributes theoretically by examining
the impact of privacy-preserving instruments on trust within integrated e-government
information. It also contributes to regional knowledge since few empirical studies have
been conducted on trust factors in Arab countries like Oman. This study extends
existing knowledge by highlighting the relationship between privacy-preserving
instruments and trust for integrated e-government services. In contrast, this study
contributes practically by improving citizens' trust, creating a culture of openness by
enabling them to provide accurate information and encouraging them to utilize e-government services. Accordingly, this study emphasizes the need for government
entities to use and implement the proposed framework to increase citizen trust and
provide better service.
