Investigating employees' understanding of the concept of privacy for the open Government initiative

Abstract

Open government aims to improve the relationship between the government and citizens. In a shift from e-Government 2.0, open government provides openness of information and openness of interactions with the public. However, these opportunities pose privacy challenges in the implementation of open government. In order to address these privacy challenges, it is important to explore public employees' understanding of personal information and privacy concepts in general. This paper reports the preliminary results of a qualitative approach to explore Malaysian public service employees' understanding of personal information and privacy. Findings of this study indicate that employees have difficulties in explaining personal information and privacy.