Data privacy im the digital age. Lessons to be learnt from EU's GDPR in the context of Africa?

#1

While we are accelerating the rate of creation of digital product, while pushing for more exports of our champions’ offerings, it seems that we often focus quite a lot on data security (think cyber security practices or policies vs users data leak, hacking etc) and not enough on the basics: privacy.
Have I allowed my telco provider to repeatedly send me promo texts? Where have I opt in for such service? Hoe do I opt out? What does the company do with my data? How can I make sure that data collection, processing, exploitation is done in a fair ethical and anonymous way?

These remain, in my humble opinion, unanswered questions that need details before / while promoting digital development locally and at the International.

We are welcoming your opinion on the matter, and why not, start of ways forward. e827ad11-8e0c-486c-8171-9755c9ba4d6c

#2

These questions are valid in our time.
We already have a lot of frameworks lying around which have a mention of Data Privacy and Security.
We now must execute them and have regulators enforce them.
The rate of data exploitation is humongous within my country, Nigeria and even in the continent.
This must be fixed!
Awareness is another area where we are doing poorly.

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#3

These are #wordsofwisdom. Thanks for your contribution.

Indeed, awareness (of data privacy, security and/or “valuation”) is an area where we can do more than we currently do.

Options for ways forward could be

  1. Educating people on data basics, like a Data 101 course; From mainstream users to regulators, in private and public sectors.
  2. Learn form best practices, internationally (eg. GDPR), and see how to adjust them to our local context. So we move slowly but surely away from a business-centred to human-centered approach when it comes to data (collection, procesing, management).
  3. Running some experiences of thought were we could, for eg., estimating how valuable are our users data.

Quite timely, I have briefly consulted the coming Bill from regulators in the US about users data protection. If interested.

" Specifically, companies with more than 100 million users would have to provide each user with an assessment of the financial value of their #data, as well as reveal revenue generated by “obtaining, collecting, processing, selling, using or sharing user data.” In addition, the DASHBOARD Act would give users the right to delete their data from companies’ databases."

Some food for thoughts.

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