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Content type: News & Analysis
Today, the Kenyan Government is starting their biometric registration exercise known as NIIMS, leading to the issuing of Huduma Namba ID numbers. Along with our colleagues and partners in the human rights community in Kenya, we are very worried about the ramifications of this system for people in Kenya, and particularly for marginalised communities.
Thanks to the hard work and timely action of civil society in Kenya, the judiciary has intervened at the last minute. A court ruling on…
Content type: Long Read
The Privacy International Network is celebrating Data Privacy Week, where we’ll be talking about how trends in surveillance and data exploitation are increasingly affecting our right to privacy. Join the conversation on Twitter using #dataprivacyweek.
It is often communities who are already the most marginalised who are at risk because of the privacy invasions of data-intensive systems. Across the globe, we see the dangers of identity systems; the harms of online violence against women and the…
Content type: News & Analysis
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This essay was published in The Sur International Journal of Human Rights, Issue 27, July 2018.
Abstract:
This essay focuses on elections in Kenya and analyses the use of technology and the exploitation of personal data in both the electoral process and campaigning. We only need to look to Kenya’s election history to understand why it is important. The 2007/2008 election resulted in violence that killed over 1,000 people and displaced over 600,000. The 2013 election was…
Content type: News & Analysis
As the international cyber security debate searches for new direction, little attention is paid to what is going on in Africa. Stepping over the remains of the UN Group of Governmental Experts, and passing by the boardrooms of Microsoft struggling to deliver their Digital Geneva Convention, African nations are following their own individual paths.
Unfortunately, these paths increasingly prioritise intrusive state surveillance and criminalisation of legitimate expression online as…
Content type: Long Read
In December 2017, Privacy International published an investigation into the use of data and microtargeting during the 2017 Kenyan elections. Cambridge Analytica was one of the companies that featured as part of our investigation.
Due to the recent reporting on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, we have seen renewed interest in this issue and our investigation. Recently in March of 2018, Channel 4 News featured a report on micro targeting during the 2017 Kenyan Presidential Elections, and the…
Content type: Long Read
To mark International Women’s Day 2018, Privacy International and some of our partner organisations - Datos Protegidos, Derechos Digitales, the National Coalition for Human Rights Defenders-Kenya, the Karisma Foundation, and the Foundation for Media Alternatives – are telling the stories of women across the world as told by their data over the next seven days (for us, it’s International Women’s Week!).
Gender inequality has many complex dimensions and data exploitation is yet another.…
Content type: News & Analysis
Written by the National Coalition for Human Rights Defenders - Kenya and Privacy International
05:00: Mercy’s alarm goes off. She gets out of the warmth of the bed into the piercing morning chill. She switches on the bedside lamp and reaches for her Bible. She then checks in onto her devotional group on Facebook, as she does every morning. Her Facebook app keeps track of her location, and the time she wakes up.
05:24: She steps into the shower and prepares for her day in the…
Content type: News & Analysis
This post was written by PI Policy Officer Lucy Purdon.
In 1956, US Presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson remarked that the hardest part of any political campaign is how to win without proving you are unworthy of winning. Political campaigning has always been a messy affair and now the online space is where elections are truly won and lost. Highly targeted campaign messages and adverts flood online searches and social media feeds. Click, share, repeat; this is what political engagement looks…
Content type: News & Analysis
Overview
CIPIT is currently investigating how the privacy of Kenyan citizens was affected by the use of biometric data during the just concluded 2017 general and repeat elections. The IEBC is mandated by law to register voters, verify their registration details and conduct elections. Accordingly, the IEBC is the custodian of the public voter register. There have been reports that individuals received SMS texts from candidates vying for various political seats during the campaign period of the…
Content type: Long Read
The battle for Kenyan voters’ allegiance in the 2017 Presidential election was fought on social media and the blogosphere. Paid advertisements for two mysterious, anonymous sites in particular started to dominate Google searches for dozens of election-related terms in the months leading up to the vote. All linked back to either “The Real Raila”, a virulent attack campaign against presidential hopeful Raila Odinga, or Uhuru for Us, a site showcasing President Uhuru Kenyatta’s accomplishments. As…
Content type: Press release
A new investigation published today by Privacy International reveals the role of an American data-based digital advertising company in the highly divisive online re-election campaign of Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta.
In the run-up to Kenya's presidential election in August 2017, paid advertisements for two mysterious sites dominated Google searches for election-related terms and flooded Kenyans' social media feeds. All linked back to either 'The Real Raila', a virulent attack campaign…
Content type: News & Analysis
Recently, a text from a local telecommunications company inquired whether its subscribers knew that they could now enroll their voice so they could access various services securely and conveniently. This added a further dynamic to the on-going debate in several quarters on the accelerated adoption of biometrics in Kenya. Does Kenya have the necessary framework in place to safeguard the privacy and security of its citizens? The reality is, innovators will not wait for an optimal…
Content type: News & Analysis
Photo Credit: MoD UK
‘Security’ in the policy world has practically no currency without a specific prefix. For example, we could discuss 'national' security as distinct from 'consumer' security or 'energy' security. ‘Cyber’ security is the new prefix on the policy block, and it is gradually forcing a rethink on what it means to be secure in a modern society. In the course of Privacy International’s work globally, we have observed that many governments frame cyber security as national security…
Content type: Long Read
In January 2017, Kenya’s information and communication technology regulator, the Communications Authority of Kenya, announced that it was spending over 2 billion shillings (around 14 million USD) on new initiatives to monitor Kenyans’ communications and regulate their communications devices. The press lit up with claims of spying, and members of Kenya’s ICT community vowed to reject the initiatives as violating Kenyans’ constitutional rights, including the right to privacy (Article 31…
Content type: News & Analysis
Image source: AFP
Earlier this month, the Kenyan daily The Star reported that UK-based data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had been quietly contracted by President Uhuru Kenyatta’s party in a bid to win himself a second term in office. State House officials were quick to deny the claims, while the company itself issued no comment.
Cambridge Analytica has exploded onto the scene following revelations that its psychometric profiling techniques were used and reportedly played a role in…
Content type: News & Analysis
On a hot day in Nairobi, our researcher is speaking to an officer of Kenya’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). The afternoon is wearing on and the conversation has turned to the presidential elections, taking place in August this year. He has just finished describing the NIS’ highly secret surveillance powers and the disturbing ways in which these powers are deployed.
“It is what you might call ‘acceptable deaths,’” he states about the misuse of communications surveillance powers. “People…
Content type: News & Analysis
When it comes to tackling corruption, we need to critically engage with the role of technology. One technology in particular is biometrics, a technology that identifies and stores on a database the identity of an individual through some physical characteristic, usually fingerprints or an iris scan. Biometrics is increasingly being used in ID and voter registration schemes. It is a technology that raises privacy and data protection issues but notwithstanding…
Content type: News & Analysis
The focus on the right to privacy continues at the United Nations, with Kenya, Turkey, and Sweden being recently challenged over their surveillance practices during the Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review of States' human rights records.
The explicit mention of the right to privacy in recommendations submitted by Slovenia and the Netherlands during the review of Sweden, in the recommendation by Estonia during Turkey's review, and Liechtenstein's recommendations to…
Content type: News & Analysis
The right to privacy is on the frontline of a struggle that has seen a number of other constitutionally protected rights threatened during the last few bloody months of Kenya's ongoing security crisis.
After at least 64 people were killed in two attacks by Al Shabaab militants in late 2014, members of the ruling Jubilee Coalition swiftly moved to introduce an omnibus bill, the Security Laws (Amendment) Bill 2014. The bill, which was hastily enacted into law despite street…
Content type: News & Analysis
What do Egypt, Kenya, Turkey, Guinea, and Sweden have in common? Despite having a Constitutional right to privacy, they are adopting and enforcing policies that directly challenge this human right.
These states are also up for a Universal Periodic Review this year before the United Nations Human Rights Council. UPRs are a mechanism within the Council aimed at improving the human rights situation in all countries and address human rights violations wherever they occur.
Despite having…
Content type: News & Analysis
One of the first things that strikes you about the chaotic East African metropolises of Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe is the blanket of adverts for mobile phone companies that covers them, from the walls of the immigration hall at Harare airport, to the rickety shacks that line the dusty streets of Kampala. Where official signage is unavailable, DIY versions are painted onto the roofs and walls of houses and small businesses. Stores selling mobile phones are rarely more than a few short steps away…