A study issued by the Arab Economic Unity Council recently estimated that the growth rate in the Arab electronic trade this year will stand at 15 per cent compared with 30 per cent world wide. Currently, the value of the electronic trade in Arab countries ranges between $3 and $5 billion.

The Arab Economic Unity Council called for increasing Arab investments in the fields of electronic industries, information techno- logy and telecommunica- tions. The study warned of the increase in the Internet piracy rate, saying that Arab electronic trade transactions, which currently involve over $7 billion investments, would be subject to piracy and stealing.

The Arab Economic Unity Council study has also revealed occurence of stealing and information leak cases for certain Arab electronic trade transactions as a result of breaking through the Internet.

The study determined two ways through which the breakthrough would take place, including the hijacking of and information stealing from personal computers of the dealers. According to the Arab Economic Unity Council study, there are other obstacles resently facing the investments expansions through the Arab electronic trade such as failure in the latent law protection. Meanwhile, Dubai has recently outranked several digitally advanced cities in the world in terms of privacy and security on its official portal, according to a global survey that covered 100 major cities. The survey of the official city websites conducted by Rutgers University (the State University of New Jersey) ranked Dubai at the ninth position along with Auckland, scoring 7.86 out of 20 points against the average score of 2.85. The survey also ranked Dubai 11th worldwide in the service delivery category ahead of Dublin, Helsinki and Tokyo.

Dubai was the only city from the Arab world to make the top 20 list. Other Arab cities figuring in the top 100 list were Amman, Manama, Riyadh, Cairo and Beirut. The security and privacy section of the survey examined the availability and quality of privacy policies and looked at issues related to authentication, encryption, digital signature, data management and use of cookies.