In Africa, scant data protection leaves Internet users exposed

NAIROBI/LAGOS: In Kenya, which has a large and fast growing population of Internet users, there are no specific laws or regulations to protect the privacy of those individuals. Kenya is not alone in Africa, which as a region has clocked the world’s fastest growth in Internet use over the past decade. Unlike in Europe and the United States, where data-privacy laws provide a level of protection to consumers, many Africans have little or no recourse if a data breach occurs because often legal and regulatory safeguards don’t exist. Recent revelations about British analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which Facebook says improperly accessed personal data of about 50 million of the social networks users in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, have also touched the African continent.

Cambridge Analytica or its parent company SCL Group worked on the 2013 and 2017 campaigns of Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta. The company was also hired to support the failed re-election bid of then-president Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria in 2015, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper. A spokesman for the Nigerian president said on Monday that the country’s government will investigate allegations of improper involvement by Cambridge Analytica in the 2007 and 2015 elections. Kenya’s ruling Jubilee party told Reuters that it had hired SCL for “branding” in the 2017 presidential election but did not elaborate on the precise nature of the work.

Cambridge Analytica didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company has suspended its chief executive pending what it said would be a full, independent investigation. Growth of Internet use in Africa, a continent of 1 billion people, has been fuelled by rapidly expanding mobile broadband networks and ever more affordable phones. That presents a major growth opportunity for Internet companies such as Facebook, which currently sees some 123 million people across sub-Saharan Africa accessing its social network platform monthly.

While some governments on the continent have responded to these rapid changes - rights campaigners welcomed a data-protection law passed by South Africa 2013 - many have not. —Reuters