Early last month Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta signed 2019 Data Protection Bill and it became a law. With this 25 of 54 African countries have implemented such laws and soon to join are Zimbabwe and Zambia.
The new data protection law of Kenya is somewhat similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
In presidential election of 2013 and 2017 the reelection of Kenyatta were embroiled in a scam and it was learned the Cambridge Analytica collected Facebook profile data of millions of citizens illegally.
The profiles of Kenyans therefore were correlated with more than 47,000 surveys to determine needs and concerns of voters. The same information in 2013 was passed on to the campaign messaging.
In 2017 the insights were used in digital campaign to help Kenyatta to get elected again as president.
The same Cambridge Analytica also was into news in 2016 for harvesting data and helping Donald Trump to win the United States presidential election.
However, now the new data law is to have a significant impact as Kenya is having the highest rates of internet penetration in the continent. Communications Authority reveals the penetration is at 112 percent.
The new law will establish a legal mechanism to regulate such collection of personal data and protect privacy of individuals.
As of now the Kenyans have the right to know why and how their personal data is being stored, handled or recorded.
