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Data Commissioner Kassait decries difficulty in taming rogue foreign lenders
Data Commissioner Immaculate Kassait delivering a speech at Vila Rosa Kempinski in Nairobi on November 19, 2024 during celebrations to mark 5 years of Kenya's Data Protection act
The lack of a global framework on data protection is making it difficult for Kenyan authorities to punish foreign digital lenders for harassment, amid rising complaints on breaches of data privacy by these apps.
Data Commissioner Immaculate Kassait said the only global mutual agreements available are mostly on terrorism, money laundering, and corruption.
“We don’t have a global framework [to deal with digital lenders]. The only available framework is Budapest (Convention on Cybercrime) which is mostly on cybersecurity,” she said, noting that this has made it hard for her office to address the problem of harassment by digital lending apps.
“It is a new area. It is something that we have to strengthen.”
The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) has been seeking assistance from foreign governments to shut down apps that violate data privacy laws in Kenya.
Among those targeted are multinationals that operate in Kenya but store their data on servers in foreign countries beyond Kenya’s jurisdiction.
Ms Kassait said although there has been a reduction in some cases for digital lenders, there have been “notorious digital lenders who are continuously violating the Data Protection Act.”
“We are looking at ways of dealing with that issue permanently. Some of them, although quite complex, include mutual legal assistance with the countries where the apps are to see whether they can permanently bring some of these apps down,” she told the Business Daily.
A new report by the Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK) for the year to June 2024, showed that the financial sector accounted for close to a third, or 197 of the 668 consumer complaints filed by Kenyans in the review period. Most of the financial sector culprits were the digital lenders.
In one of the cases filed at CAK, which the complainant forwarded to the data protection office, the complainant narrated how after he failed to repay a loan he acquired from the digital lending app, a digital lender contacted his employer.
