Conformance of UAE Police Force Personnel with Social Media Guidelines

Abstract

The popularity of social media networks continues to grow around the world day by day. The United Arabs Emirates police are not left behind with this continued progression of social media technology. This increases the risk that UAE police personnel could breach the social media usage guidelines on some cases. The UAE police members breach social media usage guidelines by putting an excess of their data in the social media and hence, endangering the security of their safety and security of those who are around them. UAE police also could breach social media policies posting or sharing sensitive information about the Police Service, using the name of UAE Police Service irresponsibly, and posting pictures and videos of themselves while in uniforms on the social media. The breach social network guidelines by the UAE police not only destroys their public reputations and operational security but also that of the entire Police Service. To investigate these issues, the project uses a quantitative and qualitative research methodology to determine how police personnel breach a derived 'best practice' social media guidelines. Social media sites provided the primary sources data. The findings of the thesis show that police members using social media sites breached the guidelines in different matters and levels in a way that threaten their personal safety and their family by sharing posts that include personal information which could be used by opponent to target a specific police member for extortion, hacking and espionage. Moreover, some breaches that is less likely to occurs were more serious, specially the one that comprise sensitive and classified information of the police core business which could reveal their tactics and special techniques to criminals in a way that helps them understand police forces procedures which leads to affecting the country national security. Through this research it seems that there was an issue that did cause most of these breaches, because of the lack of awareness about the risk of breaching social media guidelines among police members and specially the youth generation such problem is still increasing gradually. The researcher will develop recommendations for the UAE police to eliminate this problem in the future to maintain national security through one of the most important state institutions.

Date of Award	Jul 2018
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Athol Yates (Supervisor)