Privacy In Kenya Case Study

The subject of individual and data privacy in Kenya as not gathered enough national conversation and academic discourse to warrant an academic investigation. Our Kenyan law on the Privacy subject remains sketchy; though in one way or the other we can be able to make particular impressions and concepts about privacy of an individual as far as Kenyan written laws are concerned.

For a long time privacy and personal data protection in Kenya has long been an ornamental subject of banking law and of late the explosion of the telecommunication services sector has been roped in on issues concerning privacy, particularly as it relates both to protection of personal financial information in both mobile and banking platforms.

Under Article 31 of the new Constitution of Kenya, every person has the right to privacy, which includes the right not to have their person, home or property searched; their possessions seized; information relating to their family or private affairs unnecessarily required or revealed; or the privacy of their communications infringed. Consequently, In Article 35, every citizen has the right of access to information held by the State; and any information held by another person which is required for the exercise or protection of any right or fundamental freedom. Further, every person has the right to the correction or deletion of untrue or misleading information that affects him or her.

Our Kenyan privacy laws seemed to have borrowed heavily from the reference points of international conversations on privacy and data protection: the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data; the United Nations Guidelines Concerning Computerized Personal Data File...

... middle of paper ...

...ntify many anonymous records of individuals.

The internet moral standards are not well-developed enough to ensure that Web users can always be confident of each other’s trustworthiness. Kenya’s statutory regulations for privacy protection are inconsistent and in some cases fail to properly address the challenges posed by the Internet today. Do providers guarantee that they will handle the information per users’ preferences or in accordance with the law in order to achieve reasonable privacy? In some instances services providers ignore regulation on personal data on technical reasons-why encrypt personal data it might end up slowing down the services? Another challenge when personal data are passed on to third parties, it becomes even more difficult to ensure privacy protection. With all this issues service providers need to provide an assurance that their platforms