Senator Gloria Orwoba during yesterday's meeting at Parliament Buildings in Nairobi
The Senate Committee on Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) yesterday held a meeting to consider the responses to Statements sought by Sen. Gloria Orwoba and Sen. Abdul Haji regarding poor data protection measures in the SIM card registration process and plans by Safaricom PLC to block unregistered SIM cards.
The Members of the Committee expressed their dissatisfaction with the responses given by the Communication Authority of Kenya (CAK) and the telecommunication service providers adding that there’s need for them to appear before the Committee to further expound on their responses.
“The questions that were posed to the service providers, both Airtel and Safaricom, were not taken seriously. The thing that stands out for me is that no one gave us a physical location of where the data centers are so that we can verify them. The location was key but we didn’t get that from Safaricom or Airtel,” said Sen. Orwoba.
“In 2019, we passed the Data Protection Act (2019) which under Section 75 clearly states that there should have been a process to seek the consent of the data subject when collecting data, in this case being the subscribers. The service providers never sought written consent from subscribers and they have given insufficient responses,” added Sen. Osotsi.
In attendance were Sen. Gloria Orwoba (Vice Chairperson), Sen. Boy Issa Juma, Sen. Shakila Mohamed, Sen. Godfrey Osotsi and Sen. Beatrice Ogola.
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