Personal Privacy Evaluation of Smart Devices Applications Serving Hajj and Umrah Rituals

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36909/jer.13199

Abstract

Mobile Applications (apps) are one of the most important tools that provide many services in different and varied fields of human life such as social, health, commercial, political, and other services. These apps make information easily available to everyone, fast to get, and cheaper than traditional methods. The Hajj pilgrims and Umrah performances (Al-Rahman Holy guests) have a share of the electronic services provided by many governmental and private sectors inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The offered services ensure that these religious guests have the ability to gain useful knowledge before and during the period they are stayed in the land of the Two Holy Mosques. In this paper, we collected all possible apps related to Hajj and Umrah, from the Google Store, during the season of Hajj 1440 AH (2019 AD), which amounted to 471 apps through searching on relevant applications to Hajj and Umrah services. We studied the applications public info trying to gain personal privacy characteristics from user rating, number of evaluators, recent updates, volume of applications, languages, number of downloads, and specific services provided. The results showed that the largest percentage of the studied apps are the facilitations of the Hajj ritual with 18%, followed by 15.1% for Umrah ritual and 10.2% for prayer supplications. The results also indicated attractive 33 common languages used, showing English with most popularity of 27.4%, followed by Arabic and Urdu of 24.3% and 14.3%. In addition, the study specified the most desirable services favoured by the religious guests expressing interesting valuable remarks.

Author Biographies

Mohd Khaled Yousef Mohammed Shambour, Umm Al-Qura University

Dr. Mohd Khaled Yousef Mohammed Shambour is currently an associate professor specialized in IT within the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Institute of the Hajj & Umrah Research, known as Hajj research institute. He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Pinang, Malaysia. His research interest is in computer engineering, mobile applications, networking, smart devices, and cloud services. He published several journal and conference papers in the areas of IT research for Hajj and Umrah services.

Adnan Gutub, Umm Al-Qura University
Prof. Adnan Abdul-Aziz Gutub is ranked as Full Professor in Computer Engineering specialized in Information and Computer Security within College of Computers and Information Systems at Umm Al-Qura University (UQU). He has been working as the Vice Dean of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Institute of the Hajj & OmrahResearch, Known publicly as Hajj Research Institute (HRI), within (UQU), Makkah Al-Mukarramah, all Muslims religious Holy City located within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Adnan’s academic experience in Computer Engineering was gained from his previous long-time work as Associate Professor, Assistant Professor, Lecturer, and Graduate Assistant, all in Computer Engineering at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He received his Ph.D. degree (2002) in Electrical and Computer Engineering  from Oregon State University, USA. He had his BS in Electrical Engineering and MS in Computer Engineering both from KFUPM, Saudi Arabia. Adnan's research work can be observed through his 90+ publications (international journals and conferences) as well as his 5 US patents registered officially by USPTO. His main research interests involved optimizing, modeling, simulating, and synthesizing VLSI hardware for crypto and security computer arithmetic operations. He worked on designing efficient integrated circuits for the Montgomery inverse computation in different finite fields. He has some work in modeling architectures for RSA and elliptic curve crypto operations. His interest in computer security also involved steganography and secret-sharing focusing on image based steganography and Arabic text steganography as well as counting based secret sharing. Adnan’s research interest in computing and information technology have been broaden to also relate to smart crowd management and intelligent transportation engineering systems because of the involvement in Hajj and OmrahResearch at UQU - Makkah. In summer 2013, Adnan has been awarded 3-month visiting scholar grant in collaboration with Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. He had been involved in research of current studies related to Arabic Text Steganography in Data Security as well as Elliptic Curve Crypto Processor Designs. His activities at Purdue was in relation to three main research groups: Distributed Multimedia Systems Laboratory, Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments (VACCIEN). Previously, Adnan have been twice awarded the UK visiting internship for 2 months of summer 2005 and summer 2008, both sponsored by the British Council in Saudi Arabia. The 2005 summer research visit was at Brunel University to collaborate with the Bio-Inspired Intelligent System (BIIS) research group in a project to speed-up a scalable modular inversion hardware architecture. The 2008 visit was at University of Southampton with the Pervasive Systems Centre (PSC) for research related to text steganography and data security. Administratively, Adnan Gutub filled many executive and managerial academic positions at KFUPM as well as UQU. At KFUPM - Dhahran, he had the experience of chairing the Computer Engineering department (COE) for five years until moving to Makkah in 2010. Then, at UQU - Makkah, Adnan Chaired the Information Systems Department at the College of Computers and Information Systems followed by his leadership of the Center of Research Excellence in Hajj and Omrah (HajjCoRE) serving as HajjCoRE director for around 3-years until the end of 2013. Then, he was assigned his last position (until March 2016) as the Vice Dean of HRI, i.e. the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Institute of the Hajj & Omrah Research. For more details about Adnan and his activities, you are welcome to visit the links at the top of the webpage!!
Published
2021-09-15
Issue
Vol 11 No 2B (2023): Journal of Engineering Research
Section
Computer Engineering