Oral East Africa>Safaricom face backlash building backdoor access for Kenyan police At the hut of the story

Written by Oral East Africa

Early this year at the onset of the El Nino floods, Kenya’s telco giant Safaricom revealed it had the power of geolocating every customer and warning them about the risks on their lives.

The telco giant Safaricom, owned by British multinational Vodacom and the Kenyan government, deployed its advanced analytical data capabilities when it partnered with the Redcross to send geolocated warnings to their customers at risk of flooding.

The messaging curated for different location advised customers on whether their current location exposes them to the risk of storm waters, mudslides or lake backflow, advising on increased vigilance as the East African country experiences its worst flooding in years.

This capability however, also exposed how invasive the company had grown and how vulnerable the personal data generated by its customers was open for abuse.In an investigative report Daily Nation has revealed that it is Safaricom policy to share location data of Kenyans to state officers, some of who end up abducted, killed and foreign nationals rendered to oppressive governments for execution.

Safaricom is also accused of helping to obfuscate call record data for victims seeking justice from police kidnappings and killings, helping the state avoid responsibilities for the crimes against its citizens.

It rained it poured

When torrential rain pounded Kenya leading to devastating floods that have killed hundreds of people, and displaced thousands, Kenya’s private sector took up the leading role to mitigate the impact of flooding with leading corporates including Safaricom, Liquid Telcom, Amazon leading a response team in coordination with Red Cross.

However, the move to send location based alerts caught users by surprise sparking concerns about data privacy.

According to an insider with knowledge of the operation, Red Cross sent the messages to Safaricom who then shared it out to subscribers depending on their locations and that no phone numbers were shared with the humanitarian agency.

Safaricom declined to comment on the matter and officials at the Data Commissioner also declined to be interviewed, adding the media should be supportive of the efforts to deal with the calamity.

With the revelations of abuse of third party data giving the state unfettered, unregulated access to real time mobile data and location of customers through British security firm Neural Technologies, shows the data concerns were legitimate.

Billions invested in harvesting data

Safaricom faces a backlash from the revelations which could upend the company that has spent billions building high tech data mining capabilities and Artificial Intelligence (AI) analytics.

The telco and financial service provider which declared EBIT of $1 billion (Kes139.9 billion) for the full year 2024, on accelerated digital capabilities in mobile money and transactions is leveraging big data to expand reach and offer personalized services to its 34.6 million customers.

The Nairobi securities Exchange listed firm has also expanded into Ethiopia offering it deeper penetration into over almost 129 million population and the region’s largest economy, that is just opening up to global competitive access.

Safaricom says it is accelerating its digital business that straddles financial services, transactions while creating a platform for merchants to plug in to drive payments, with the Telco announcing 9.6 million downloads of its super application.

Safaricom Ceo Peter Ndegwa announced the company is launching a customer segmentation product targeting the youth called ‘Safaricom Hook’ that promises to curate products to personalized preferences and lifestyle choices, modeled on digital footprints.

The company could also make good return on its messaging revenue lines which is showing a resurgence on the growth of bulk messaging as with an upswing to $93.9 million (Kes12.3 billion) in revenues last year.