Negligible data protection in Africa leaves internet users exposed

NAIROBI/LAGOS: In Kenya, which has a large and fastgrowing 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 US, 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 network’s users in the 2016 US presidential election, have also touched Africa. 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 this week the country’s government would investigate allegations of improper involvement by Cambridge Analytica in the 2007 and 2015 elections.

Kenya’s ruling Jubilee party said it had hired SCL for “branding” in the 2017 presidential election but did not elaborate on the precise nature of the work.

The 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 cellphones.

That presents a major growth opportunity for internet companies such as Facebook, which has about 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 in 2013 – many have not. Privacy advocacy groups say that is leaving a lot of Africans, many of whom are accessing the internet for the first time, with little or no protection. More than half of Africa’s 54 countries have no data protection or privacy laws, according to London- based rights group Article 19.

In Kenya, a country of 44 million people with about 8.5 million using Facebook on a monthly basis, specialists say no specific data-protection laws exist. The government said it was drafting a data protection bill.

But even some data-privacy bills that have been introduced in African parliaments have been held up for years.

In Nigeria, the African country with the most internet users, a data-protection bill introduced in 2010 is still making its way through parliament.

Data privacy groups say many African governments have a vested interest in not introducing such laws because they use citizens’ data for their own ends – whether for political campaigns, as in Kenya, or for suppressing political dissent, as rights groups allege the government in Tanzania has done since passing a cyber crime law in 2015.

Privacy advocates say another issue impacting data protection in Africa is that some companies, including Facebook, have introduced stripped- down versions of their own platforms for no fee.

From users of its Free Basics service, Facebook collects information such as when the service was accessed, what type of device they are using and the mobile operator used, according to the company’s website.

“We may also share such usage information with the providers of third-party services,” Facebook said.

While specialists say public awareness about the importance of data protection in Africa is far less than in the US and Europe, there are signs of growing concern.

Phumzile van Damme of the DA, has raised concerns about what she called the “digital dark arts” being used to manipulate voters ahead of the general elections scheduled for next year.

Writing on Twitter, Van Damme said she was studying the lessons of the 2016 US election and reading reports of the involvement of private firms including Cambridge Analytica in “manipulating” voters using their data in recent African elections.

She said she hoped the communications regulator was doing the same. “Regulation always lags behind technological developments,” she said. – Reuters/African News Agency (ANA)

President Uhuru Kenyatta