Community Health: Kenya Data Debt Spiral

00:00.66
Caitlin
We have hopefully a nice change of pace for you today. When we ask you, our listeners, for the types of editions you enjoy, we get a wide variety of responses that make it fascinating for us to host this podcast. You know, wide variety of content and formats, and that's awesome. and There are deep dives into pressing and complex issues. There are conversations around ideas to make sense of the world. And there are explorations that go deep into how the issues we care about are experienced in people's lives across the world. The next three editions are that. They;re are series of explorations into people's lived realities. We have guests from Kenya, Colombia, Vietnam, and Ghana talking about their work, particularly with young people.

00:36.38
Gus
And what makes this series so interesting is that it was done through a health initiative. That is, we've been fortunate over the past few years to work in a research network called the Digital Health and Rights Project. And that project involved engaging with diverse young adults from across the world using participatory action research methods. And the project investigates essentially how tech, health, and human rights intersect in a context of global and local inequalities, and advocates for uh collectively for rights of young adults in civil society in low- and middle-income countries.

Caitlin
So being part of this project and has allowed us to meet with people doing incredible work on health, including organizations working with diverse communities like people living with and affected by HIV around the world.

01:26.71
Gus
And so as part of this project, in each of those countries, the researchers set up what is called a community advisory team, more often referred to as a CAT within the project, that these teams would bring together young adults,

01:42.81
Gus
health advocates and rights advocates to explore these really complex issues. And in this series of conversations you're about to hear, we get to bring you into some of that work to hear what the researchers learned and to hear what we learned along the way.

01:59.58
Caitlin
And we learned a lot by approaching the issues that we love, not from how they are so important on their face, but how they come to have meaning and value as young people like live their lives. So this episode um on Kenya and the next two you'll see on Colombia, Vietnam and Ghana are going to be marked Community Health. If you're interested, then we think they're pretty interesting. If you're not, no worries. We'll be back to our normal tech pill programming shortly.

02:35.02
Gus
Welcome to The Tech Pill, a podcast that looks at how technology is reshaping our lives every day and exploring the different ways that governments and companies use tech to increase their power. My name is Gus Hosein and I'm the Executive Director of Privacy International. And I'm Caitlin and PI's Campaigns Coordinator. Hi.

02:52.54
Gus
This week we're talking about life in Kenya as a young person, from mobile money to data protection to government surveillance. In a sense, I guess it's a combination or the lived reality of so many of our previous, more recent podcasts. We're going to be talking about ID, we're going to be talking about government surveillance, we're going to be talking about laws that don't actually work and what it actually means in people's lives. And we're very excited about our guest today.

Caitlin
So let's just get right ahead and jump in.

03:21.58
Gus
Yeah.

03:35.16
Joan
I wear very many hats. I'm not sure which hat you want to introduce in this particular setting.

Caitlin
Well, it's kind of up to you. Which hat would you prefer was foregrounded?

03:46.78
Joan
Well, I'm Joan Musenya. My work looks at the intersection of the digital health, financial access, and data rights, and particularly through the Digital Health Rights Project with KELIN. So I'm particularly very interested in how digital systems are meant to expand access and especially for vulnerable young women in Global South.

Caitlin
That's perfect. That's brilliant. And it brings us very neatly onto our first question, which is you've been working with the Digital Health Rights Project and with KELIN in Kenya. Could you explain a little bit about the research you've been doing?

04:21.81
Joan
I've been very keen on how digital health and financial access is becoming more and more accessible to young women. And in particular,

04:33.28
Joan
how we are moving in the era of AI. And that means that us as young people, we need to have smartphones that are connected to the internet. How is that becoming accessible in the country? And I'll give an example, particularly in Kenya, where we're having these very cheap phones that are being sold. You can pay...

04:54.58
Joan
...as a microloan, every day, a particular amount, it does give us young people access to the internet and um access to communication and access to information out there. But at what costs?

05:09.87
Joan
I've been looking at it keenly on how young people are becoming slaves to these mobile loans. We have a name for them, we call them Lipa pole pole loans in Kenya. And how at the end of the day, you find that these loans are so punitive such that young people end up paying three times the amount of that phone.

Gus
Oh no.

Joan
Yeah.

05:31.19
Joan
And you're supposed to pay $2 every day. It's like really cheap. It's $2 every day, but $2, how accessible, how affordable is that for a young person who's jobless? Who's probably in school, who's unemployed, who is living below the poverty line.

05:48.87
Joan
$2 is a lot. And if you don't pay that $2, they switch off the phone. You can't call, you can't text, you can't communicate with that phone at all. It becomes so bad sad that these young people end up working for these phones. So you go for every day, the work that you're doing, the $2 that you're being paid, $2 in my country is like $200 Bob. So you'll find that some some of the young people, the jobs that they do, the manual jobs that they do, that's the amount that they get paid. All of that goes to paying for the mobile phone. So you're paying for information. You're paying for internet access, but you don't have food on your table.

06:25.85
Joan
You do not have transport. You do not have a house. So at the end of the day, young people are becoming more and more slaves to these punitive mobile phones. Yeah.

Gus
And what kind of phones are we talking about?

06:37.78
Joan
It's such a basic phone, Gus. I mean,

Gus
Oh no

Joan
it's a very basic phone. It's a phone that's probably worth $50, but you will end up paying up to $200 for it.

06:51.25
Joan
It's that bad.

Gus
Outrageous.

Joan
When you pay for the phone, it doesn't come with the internet. It doesn't come with data. It doesn't come with airtime. You still have to buy airtime and buy data and all.

Caitlin
It's really interesting because a few years ago, PI did a lot of research on cheap phones, you know for a given value of cheap, but like comparatively low cost phones. And those low cost phones, whilst they are worth $50, which isn't a small amount of money, they're also significantly less good for the privacy of the person using them. They often come with loads of bloatware, like, you know, it claims it's got, I don't know,

07:30.42
Caitlin
two, three gigabytes of space or whatever. And then like a third of that's taken up with nonsense apps you can't get rid of. They've got loads trackers. They've got loads of other things. And so if you've got no money, then you end up with a worse quality of privacy. To have no money, end up with a worse quality of privacy and have to pay for that three times over is like horrendous. With the kind of increased digitization, particularly in Kenya with things like M-Pesa, and access to health and access to information, is the internet becoming such a vital part of people's lives that these loans are just, there's no other option. You can't go without.

Joan
Yes. There's this joke that we always say about my country. In Kenya, we have good internet, actually very good internet compared to most of the African countries, have very good internet,

08:15.90
Joan
cheap data and very idle young people. And that is why we're always fighting online wars.

08:25.72
Joan
Young people are not employed, but then we have great internet and a lot of information out there and very educated. We have a cohort of young people who are extremely educated, who have access to very good internet and a lot of time in their hands.

08:43.05
Joan
Yes, so that results to a lot of bullying online, a lot of young people spending too much time on the internet, and learning from and accessing most of the services through the internet because it's accessible, it's it's cheap. So in my country, we're in an era where...

08:58.71
Joan
I can't think of any young person that I would mention off my head that doesn't know how to use the internet from as young as the age of 10 years. Probably younger if you're in the urban areas, even in the rural areas by the age of 12 years, you're already accessing internet, you're already using M-Pesa and navigating these digital platform with a lot of ease. So access in my country is not a problem.

09:23.38
Joan
The challenge is what that access is meeting. Because when you combine widespread connectivity with an unemployment and economic pressure, you create this situation where young people are spending more time online and sometimes engaging in, yeah as I was saying, lot of online bullying. ah I mean, ah we we are known Kenyans actually, which is not a good reputation for being very very intense online bullies.

Gus
Argumentative, perhaps.

Joan
Yeah. I mean, we made CNN apologize, so...

Gus
fair enough.

Joan
...Yeah, so we can be intense.

10:04.54
Joan
And most of these young people are online because they're trying to find opportunities, and but they're also increasingly being exposed to digital financial products, such as these you know punitive loans.

10:18.01
Joan
So the same infrastructure that enables access to information also becomes the channel through which young people are targeted, profiled, and drawn into borrowing.

10:31.54
Joan
And that is the contradiction. So as much as we have solved the issue of access to information, internet access, we haven't really solved protection.

10:43.06
Joan
We are far from solving that.

Caitlin
And when you say targeted, like, do you mean in a technological sense or in a sense of being so online and it just being kind of very, very common and so people stumbling across it more often?

10:55.77
Joan
So we're talking about young people accessing social media platforms that are harvesting their information and sending it to that [unclear]. We've had these cases where Facebook and all these online platforms get your information, your location, and you know, your demographic information, and they sell these to the parties who then send you marketing adverts, loan adverts. Like particularly if I open my TikTok account, I won't even go five scrolls before Zenka, a mobile loan app, shows up offering to give me a loan of $5,000 like $50, which is like very affordable interest.

11:40.86
Joan
So it looks very promising on the outside. But if you look at the payment cycles, how much you end up paying, it's very punitive. But as a young person who's unemployed,

11:53.59
Joan
who needs these 5,000 shillings? I won't even look at the fine blueprint. I'm going to be, okay, let me, all they need is my name, my ID number, my phone number, and my information about my next of kin. I'm going to give all these details and then I get my 5,000. I'll delete it later.

12:15.22
Joan
You know? But at the end of the day, we keep on accumulating these loans and they don't get paid. And you know, the worst part about these loans is if you don't pay because they have access to your mobile phone, you give them access through the app that you downloaded. They get into your contacts.

12:33.21
Joan
They start calling people in your contacts.

Gus
Oh my God.

Joan
Yeah.

Caitlin
And when they call people like...

Joan
Yeah, they'll call them, they'll call your colleagues and tell them, tell Joan to pay the loan that she owes us. They'll call your relatives. We have heard these cases. Some have even gone to court about the level of harassment that these people will do to the people in your contacts. Just randomly because when you're installing the app, you'll give it access to...

12:58.62
Joan
all the access to your contact list, access to your messages. It is such dire infringement of your rights. Very sad. Again, we have increased access, but we are so far from figuring out protection.

[Music break]

13:22.74
Gus
So it's interesting because about 20 years ago, i was doing some research with researchers in the region and that included Kenya. And we were doing research on health and access to health services. And it was early days of everything. But, what they were saying at the time was the problem was that there was only one mobile phone for every family. And that mobile phone belonged often to the head of the household.

13:50.39
Gus
And as a result, any text messages coming in from doctors or from the health services would necessarily have to go through the head of the household first. And I'm curious now with this distribution of technology, like with 10 year olds who are now on the internet in Kenya, yeah, it just feels odd that there's just so much technology. i But i guess in theory, these problems no longer exist or how does this work in in health services?

Joan
So the the disparity when it comes to technology is so loud in my country, it's amazing. And I completely relate to what you're saying, Gus, because when I was a teenager, It's true. We only had one phone in my household and that was my father's phone. And I don't even think I remember how it looked like because I probably saw it less than 10 times. So the only, at that times, the only way could access internet was or information was either through him or I would have to go to the cyber, which was very expensive at that time.

15:02.74
Joan
And now we are in an era where there are a lot of phones everywhere, cheap phones. In my household, currently, there are like three phones.

15:13.02
Joan
So a lot has progressed within the last one decade in terms of access, because now we have very cheap phones. We have a lot of good internet.

15:24.49
Joan
Accessibility is no longer a problem. The problem is how does this access look like for a young person? When we talk about a young girl who's living in a middle-class setting, they probably have enough access to the internet. This young person lives in a household that has probably more than two phones.

15:45.03
Joan
There's a likelihood she has her own phone. In 2026, it's very common for them to have their own phone. But then if you look at a young girl who's living in an informal setting like Kibera slums, that is very different because as much as the phones are cheap, how cheap is cheap?

16:04.12
Gus and Caitlin
Yeah. yeah

Joan
So we still have young people who don't have these mobile phones, but they have peers who have the phones. So as much as they're not relying on one phone that probably is with the mother or the father, they have one of their peers who has a phone that they all use.

16:23.38
Joan
So how private is your information?

Gus
Wow.

Caitlin
Because there are so many around and because access has has changed so much, have you found that more and more things have moved online even as the disparity has remained? like Because I think what's really interesting about Kenya, at least when I went, is how like ubiquitous M-Pesa is, which is a mobile money kind of payment platform, right? It's everywhere. But if you don't have that access, then...

16:50.87
Caitlin
i like it's no longer ubiquitous if that makes sense. And I wonder if the volume of phones and the availability of phones and the availability of the internet has pushed more things online even while the disparity remains.

Joan
That is very true. You see, as much as phones are relatively cheap,

17:09.46
Joan
a SIM card is even cheaper. A SIM card in my country costs less than a dollar. And all I need for me to be able to have mobile money is the SIM card. So this brings in another danger because as a young person, I do not have a phone, but I have a SIM card and my SIM card has money. So what am I going to do? I'm going to borrow any phone nearby, put in my SIM card, get access to my money. But then when I put my SIM card in that phone, my messages are going to go to that phone.

17:42.39
Joan
Again, privacy.

Caitlin
That's fascinating.

Gus
I've never thought about that. Oh my God. Because I've never shared a phone with somebody.

Joan
I'm even shocked that you guys are shocked because this is our reality. I personally don't even know. I'm realizing I should probably be shocked, but it's very common for young people sharing phones. It's really common for us young people.

Gus
So it's in a sense, it's not much different than sharing a computer, but just there's something about the SIM.

Joan
Yeah.

Catilin
Yeah.

18:12.39
Caitlin
I've never thought about a SIM as something that you would carry independently. But like, now you've said it, I'm like, of course people do that. That makes so much sense. It's low key genius. But you're right. Like if you are putting your SIM card into lots of different phones, and especially if you have like, you know, medical information or medical texts, particularly like if you have a condition that is comparatively marginalized, like if you're living with HIV or any number of other things....

Joan
Exactly.

18:39.16
Joan
I mean, we've had so many cases of young people who've been outed on their status through that because your phone is where you receive your message from your facility to come pick your drugs. And now you put in this SIM card on your friend's phone and you have... they... they don't know that you're on treatment.

19:00.28
Joan
And that message comes in and that is just how you're outed. We have so many cases.

Caitlin
Is it socially different? Because if it's like your parents finding out, then it it feels like probably more dangerous than if it's like mates.

19:16.47
Caitlin
But then I don't know if that's just a bit of false accounting.

Joan
You see, ah in my country, you can't legally register a SIM card until you're 18 years and you have an ID. So the SIM card that I own was registered for me by my boyfriend right or a friend. So I don't want my mom to know that I have a SIM card.

19:35.29
Joan
So it's about lesser evil. it is

Caitlin
Exactly, yeah, lesser evil, exactly.

Joan
Yeah. So I won't go use my mother's phone because my mother doesn't know I own a SIM card.

Caitlin
Right, right.

Joan
I'd rather use, I'd rather risk with my peers' phone.

19:53.78
Joan
Or a stranger's phone.

Gus
A part of me is loving this subterfuge. I feel like we're raising a generation of hackers as a result of this, but it's also, you know, with all the trouble that goes with it.

20:05.24
Gus
Wow. Wow. You walk around with like a wallet full of SIM cards for all the reasons you might have.

Joan
I mean, in my country, we have phones that can accommodate up to three SIM cards.

Gus
No, I did not know that.

20:17.82
Joan
yeah see

Gus
See, to me, if you told me that before this conversation, I would say you must be a spy. But no it's it's just because this is how you live.

Joan
Yeah. And we're not just talking about just having the SIM card and the mobile money.

20:33.78
Joan
We're also talking about the mobile loans. I think my brother has 10 SIM cards.

Gus
Oh, God.

Caitlin
Like a Rolodex of SIM cards.

Joan
Yeah. Because there was a time where you could register as many as possible, but then SafariCom narrowed it down to now you can't have more than five, i think, registered to your name.

20:54.04
Joan
So now you will register and then you would go look for your for someone else's ID, you register using that. So this is creating a lot of ID theft, identity theft, a lot of it.

21:05.78
Joan
Because, for example, I've already taken a loan with my number that's registered with my ID. I can't register any more lines under my name and I need to take a mobile loan, the microloans.

21:18.61
Joan
So I'll go take my mother's ID or my someone's ID who I know ah has only one number. So they still have loads they can register.

21:29.82
Joan
And then at the end of the day, the person, like, I've had this incident again with my brother where he registered a line with my ID and I had to pay for that loan because I didn't know I took a loan.

21:45.05
Joan
So this is actually very common with young people. And it's leading to serious ID theft. It's actually a prevalent issue currently in the country where your ID has been used to register another SIM card somewhere and someone used it to take a loan. So nowadays, apparently, I hear they require you to physically be there and, you know, take a photo of of yourself before you register the line.

22:09.40
Joan
So they're trying to curb that.

Gus
And so, like back when you could have 10, back when you didn't have to show ID in order to get the SIM, was there less fraud because there were less loans through the SIM because it was not considered as secure?

22:25.62
Gus
Or was it just as problematic?

Joan
Mobile loans have really grown in the last 10 years. So back in 2009, we didn't have mobile loans.

22:39.29
Joan
We only had M-Pesa. We didn't even have M-Shuri, which is now linked to M-Pesa. So you could only send and receive money. The mobile loan started around 2012, there about. And it's around that time when now, because there was a lot of people registering phones randomly because you didn't need to have, you know, the physical ID. And this was something that was being done with the registration agents.

23:06.65
Joan
So they would register for you lines as many as possible. And then you would go taking loans, taking loans, taking loans.

Gus
Oh God.

Joan
Yeah. So they started now you have having these every line, every phone number, every SIM card has to be linked to an ID.

23:22.78
Joan
But then it it has now increased the ID theft because yeah I only need an ID. Doesn't necessarily mean that I have to show my face and I can go to, because we have these, i mean, you've been to Kenya, you've seen these M-Pesa agents all over. You can just go to your nearest M-Pesa agent and give them the ID. They don't...they don't care if it's your face or not.

23:42.71
Joan
You just want to sell the SIM card. Okay. So they register you. So nowadays, recently, I think it's in the last year or the other year, you now cannot register a SIM card unless you go to a Safaricom shop, not the M-Pesa agent.

Gus
And at that shop, will they do a better job of the identity verification or is it just like at the M-Pesa shop?

Joan
It's better than the M-Pesa one, definitely, because at some point the identity thieves, let me call them mad, they would even work in cahoots with these M-Pesa agents because these M-Pesa agents are young people who are someone who's just finished Form 4 and they need a side hustle, something to do as their way to join campus. So they're very young people and, you know, so it it was easy for them to...

24:30.20
Joan
maneuver around the M-Pesa agents than it is now to maneuver with the Safaricom agents because this is managed primarily by Safaricom. It's not an independent.

24:41.56
Joan
So if you're, I've right now, if I find out that someone has registered a SIM card under my name and I don't know, then i can sue Safaricom because they are primarily in charge or currently in charge of registering all SIM cards.

[Music break]

25:06.36
Caitlin
So at the moment, the experience, the whole experience is: you're a young person, you're scrolling on TikTok, you're being targeted with advertising for loans. You take out a microloan, which is attached to a SIM card, which may or may not be assigned to your name, which you're putting in kind of a stranger or friend's phones, which is accessing their contacts. So when you don't pay back the microloan, it's calling not necessarily even all your contacts, but their contacts.

Joan
It's a mess.

Caitlin
And it's just... amazing like how many stages there are and how many ways in which your privacy is being violated your data the the names and numbers of your friends like every single aspect of that is kind of built on violating your privacy, yeah...

Gus
But the thing I love most, the thing I absolutely love most about what you're saying, though, is I've been working on identity policy for way too long, and I keep on trying to avoid getting into these fights. But when people talk about how important ID is, there are two countries on the planet they refer to as where ID has been in essential and the innovations have been so essential. So they point to Kenya and they point to India.

26:13.82
Gus
And what I find fascinating about your example, apart from Caitlin's outrage about the situation that arises or the result of it, is what you said about people taking legal action against Safaricom. Because Safaricom, while they're the essentially the assurer of identity, they're liable when something goes wrong. And that's the missing part of all ID systems. Who is at fault when something goes wrong? And it's Safaricom being the largest telco in Africa, let alone one of the largest on the planet. So it is really interesting the direction of these things. Okay, but my ID rant is over. Like, I don't want to talk about ID too much.

Joan
But then this still doesn't take away the risk of having your ID take a loan that then didn't necessarily come to you.

26:58.68
Joan
I remember my first SIM card that I ever owned was registered by my mother. And it didn't have her ID details. That time it wasn't important.

27:09.78
Joan
All we needed was a name. But because she didn't think I needed to have an ID that has my name, it was registered in her name. The second SIM card I owned was mine, but I didn't even register with my ID. I didn't have an ID. I was 17. I didn't have an ID. So I just had a SIM card. Right now, as we speak, I have two cousins who have SIM cards registered with my ID.

Gus
Oh, really?

27:41.30
Joan
But then they keep taking loans with these SIM cards that I keep paying.

Gus
oh You are the best cousin ever.

Joan
I know. I know.

27:55.29
Joan
So despite the fact that I know and I um i registered these SIM cards for them and I gave them, it doesn't take away the risk of them taking loans with these SIM cards. And I can't control that because they don't live with me. They're in school. Yeah.

28:07.77
Joan
But whenever they take, like there was a time they had a Fuliza loan, that it's a loan that is linked to your M-Pesa. And I didn't know about it. And so I got this message from Safaricom in the land that I use, that I have a Fuliza loan that is way overdue and it's going to affect my M-Shuri. M-Shuri is like, it's a savings platform.

28:28.66
Speaker
Again, linked to M-Pesa. M-Pesa is amazing. It's, I mean, Safaricom, they were genius with that. So I had to pay the Fuliza. So we have we're having so many of these instances where caregivers and guardians are forced to pay loans for young people because of the lines they're using are under their name.

28:50.46
Joan
So it still doesn't take away the risk of a young person taking a loan that they can't pay because it was offered to them in a very vulnerable setting because if you're giving me 5,000 and I don't have that 5,000, I'm going to take it without a payment plan.

29:06.42
Joan
And they don't even ask for if you're employed or or if you have any source of income. They don't care. Just take the loan.

Caitlin
It sounds a bit like we've had a lot of issues with like loot boxes and other kind of gambling style things in kids' games. And the number of stories we've seen of like kids racking up huge bills that their parents then get presented with like, you know, your child has spent a thousand pounds on... a loot box in some random Roblox game or Minecraft. And you can tell I'm just ever slightly too old.

Gus
You're not down with the kids.

Caitlin
I'm too old for the games, but I'm not old enough to have kids playing the games. Yeah. But it is a similar thing where kids, you know, are being presented with things with financial implications with very little checks, which are arguably entirely targeted at them because they're kids, because they maybe don't have that like,

30:01.75
Caitlin
responsible thing and they have someone with maybe slightly more money who's responsible for them and then it's similar with like buy now pay later apps like klarna and others that you know takes very quote-unquote small purchases and promise to split them over a a number of periods with again similarly without doing the checks on can you actually afford this? Is it responsible for us to give you this loan? iI this going to cause you problems? That you know a traditional bank loan would do ...

Joan
Uh-huh. Then, you know, getting guarantors and, you know, collateral, they don't do any.

30:33.34
Joan
So at the end of the day, ah for them to recover their money, they have to harass you, harass your relatives, harass people in your contact list. even to the point of harassing your work colleagues.

Caitlin
Has anything changed since the Data Protection Act came in? Because the Kenyan Data Protection Act is pretty recent, I think.

Joan
So I would applaud my country for the Data Protection in Act. It's a step in the right direction. But Caitlin, if you've read that Data Protection Act properly, it's very lazy.

31:07.34
Joan
It's very general and very ambiguous. So again, as I said, it's a step in the right direction. But we have a long way to go in terms of having a very robust data protection act.

31:22.89
Joan
Honestly, the first time I read it, was like, did they ChatGPT this?

Gus
Chat GPT-3.0.

31:30.68
Joan
right But it's again, ah we are, I mean, we are the first country in East Africa to have a data protection. at So it's ah it's a step in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go in terms of refining it to make sure that it's a very robust.

31:45.72
Joan
That is the first issue. The second issue is, yes, we have a data protection act, but how good are we in terms of implementing it? The implementation of these data protection act is very, I mean, it's there, you know about it, but how many people again know about it? And what are the reporting mechanisms in place? Have we seen people who've gone to jail because we haven't seen anyone yet? People just sue people for infringement of rights.

32:13.94
Joan
They get fined. And some cases even take forever. they never You never get really justice. I've had cases that I know of where people have sued for infringement of their privacy and it has been thrown out.

32:28.79
Joan
Because again, corruption, because it's about how much you pay, how much do you pay to get the case kicked out. So we're talking about you suing a big company, a giant like Safaricom or these loan apps, because i mean, they're companies, they're making a lot of money.

32:46.68
Joan
And me, a young person who's unemployed, who doesn't have any source of income, what chance do I stand in town? They'll bribe the judge, the data protection office and have my case thrown out. I've seen so many of such cases.

32:59.35
Joan
So at the end of the day, I do know that these people violated my rights, but I'm very lazy to do anything about it because it won't go anywhere. It's going to get thrown out.

Gus
So what what makes me very sad about that is that when you get a data protection law, particularly in the case of Kenya, the data protection law was coming in at a time when the Kenyan government wanted to introduce an ID system. It was coming in at a time where the health sector was being digitized.

33:26.87
Gus
So the law is supposed to be the enabler of those in that only with this law could those systems be made safe. And yet here you're telling us that the law is not that great and its implementation is uneven. Can we talk a little bit about the health aspects of these things?

Joan
Thank you so much Gus, for mentioning that. And um at that time when we were doing a lot of advocacy against the NUPI, we just called it the NUPI number, this unique number that you would have that would have all your health information. And i was working for an organization. I don't know you know that organization, NEPHAK. I was working for NEPHAK at that time and we did a lot of advocacy against that because we could see the vulnerabilities of it.

34:13.56
Joan
I mean, yes, the government is saying, we have this but we have this protection act that's going to protect you and your data, but is it? Is it? One of the risks of that is the larger picture happening between Kenya and the US, s where Trump is giving us money, but we're giving our data to them. I have no idea why they are sort interested with the health data. But it's very interesting that our government can just sell our health data to other parties

34:44.69
Joan
So let's assume that NUPI number had gone through. It would mean that a third party somewhere has access to all the medications that Joan takes, all the regimens have taken, everything concerning Joan's health, everything.

35:01.14
Joan
And if they're selling it to that, what stops them from doing it to another and another that we don't know about? Because, I mean, it's Kenya. We know our government does a lot of shady businesses with private entities that we've come to find out way later.

35:16.60
Joan
So when it comes to digitizing our health information, it's something that I feel we are still not ready for it, because we still do not have the robust data protection laws to ensure that we are protected, not even against ourselves, our individuals, but against the government itself.

35:35.50
Joan
Because the first people that are going to violate that is the government.

[Music break]

35:52.79
Gus
So it's fascinating that we're covering the whole stack of life in Kenya, where right now we're talking about the power of the government to essentially with access to your health data to make that data available to others without your control.

36:07.00
Gus
But we're earlier, we're also talking about people who have to share their phones, who receive their text messages from their health provider. That health provider might be the local clinic for people living with HIV. And so your data is just leaking everywhere. It's layers and ayers. It's layers and layers.

36:28.79
Gus
And so it's down to the family and the friendship networks all the way up to governments and other governments or other companies. But don't worry, you have a data protection law. It's very interesting.

Joan
There was a time we did this research with KELIN under the DHRP. We were asking young people about...

36:45.50
Joan
what it means for them to know that they're being surveilled. And we were asking them a series of questions. Which one is most scary to you, being surveilled by your family, being surveilled by your facility, or being surveilled by your government?

37:00.86
Joan
And they didn't care about the government, which is very scary, but I would understand why. They're more concerned about being surveilled by their family.

Gus
Fascinating.

Joan
So as young people, i feel like we are at that place where we know, I know my information is being used somewhere where I have not given access to, but I'm going to choose my head.

37:25.47
Joan
I'm going to control my environment and just ensure that the people around me are not the people that are leaking the information. So if they're using Joan's information out there, they don't know it's me.

37:37.85
Joan
So they don't know the face to it. So I'd rather deal with protecting myself against the people who have a face to the name rather than the people who only have the name.

37:48.82
Joan
So that means that i as a young person, I won't hesitate, if the government is collecting data about me. I'll give them all the data that they want.

37:59.51
Joan
But I will hesitate if I am disclosing something to my family. Or if I learn that my aunt or my mother it has been reading my texts or looking through my laptop or I'm Googling, I would worry more about that than worry about the government surveilling what I'm Googling, what are my messages. That doesn't concern me much. That is the place where young people are, which is again, very scary because it comes from a point of ignorance, but then lack of information and lack of sensitization, because to me, it won't concern me because I don't know what they're doing with that. And I don't think it affects me.

38:43.38
Joan
Yeah. I don't know it affects me. But with with my circle, I know how it affects me. Because these young people do not understand the implication of the government surveilling them, of these private entities having their data and their information, their own damage.

Gus
I remember a PhD I examined about 15 years ago where it was about HIV clinics in Kenya and how, ah again, it was it was just at the time where where mobile was taking off. But there were case studies or examples or anecdotes of how: if you showed up at a health clinic and you you were in the waiting room outside a specific door, that meant you were there to get treatment for HIV. And then the worst thing could happen is if your family member who also worked in that clinic saw you outside that door, then the news would travel. And so but the protection of privacy, it wasn't a database question...

39:41.02
Gus
...as much as it was that societal pressure question. But as the database becomes more and more integral and that data gets sold and shared and so on and so forth, I imagine it's not like the concerns of people are going to just reside only in the community. It's nice to know that there is this natural revulsion towards the loss of control. And I think it's it's almost a duty of the advocate to make sure that that extends up the stack all the way back up to government's actions.

Caitlin
I think we're probably overrunning a tiny little bit because you're fascinating. We would talk to you forever.

40:17.90
Gus
You're a great podcast guest for your first podcast.

Caitlin
Yes, you should do more podcasts.

Gus
You should do more podcasts.

Yeah, guys you shoul nvite me for more conversations.

Caitlin
We will. We will. Thank you so much for joining us.

40:43.77
Gus
Thanks for listening. You can sign up to be the first to learn more about our work at pbcy.org slash pod sign up. And we'll include some links to relevant articles and information in the description wherever you're listening or on our website at pbcy.org slash tech pill.

41:02.45
Gus
Don't forget to rate and subscribe to the podcast and whichever platform you use. Music courtesy of Sepia. This podcast was produced by Max Burnell for Privacy International.