NAIROBI 4th November 2022; Today on the grand finale of the Privacy Symposium Africa happening at Strathmore University in Nairobi – Kenya, Unwanted Witness together with the Centre for Intellectual Property Law and Information Technology have launched this year’s Privacy Scorecard report.
The Privacy scorecard report is a compliance, transparency and accountability monitoring toolkit deployed by Unwanted Witness and partners to ensure data and privacy compliance through analysing different legal regimes on data protection and privacy, compliance by different actors, documenting violations and the remedial steps taken for the violations and provide recommendations for improvement.
This year’s privacy scorecard report is built upon last year’s privacy scorecard report and it concentrates on three sectors; Banking, Telecommunication and e-commerce sectors in Kenya and Uganda on the basis that the three sectors have had the widest transition into digitalisation, have the biggest market share but the companies have this year been anonymised to reflect unbiased analysis of the finding.
The report aimed at determining the legal protections of personal data and privacy in Uganda and Kenya, evaluating compliance changes implemented by selected companies that featured in the previous scorecard report and further documenting abuses and violations by the assessed companies and providing recommendations to improve their compliance with the data protection and privacy regulatory regimes in their respective country of operation.
The scoring and evaluation criteria were based on the data protection and privacy principles of, (informed) consent, accountability, and Data security employed by companies identified above when dealing with volumes of personal data collected from clients through Know Your Customer tools.
The findings of the report indicate that the Kenyan and Ugandan Companies performed well with 75% and 70.8% scores respectively for having public, publishable, noticeable, and readable Privacy Policies yet all performed poorly on accountability this means that none of the companies from both countries had a published transparency report.
The report further highlights that Ugandan companies operating in the finance sector averagely performed very well especially on informed consent and data security compared to their counterparts in Kenya. However, the findings indicate that companies in the two countries are doing badly in data security, for a consumer, this means that companies have not deployed robust measures on their websites to protect the users’ personal data.
“The scorecard report compliments the discussion we have had for the past three days to ensure that data subjects have reference and can be helped to under standard how entities observe Data protection and privacy standards” –Said Ms Mukasa Dorothy ED Unwanted Witness.
We believe that the report will offer guidance to consumers when interacting with the different service providers mapped in this report and influence service providers’ compliance with their respective data protection legal regimes.
About The Unwanted Witness
The Unwanted Witness, Uganda is a civil society organisation (CSO) that was established to respond to the gap in effective communication using various online expression platforms