In a day, I'll receive four different messages from Safaricom, three different messages from Airtel, two different messages from my bank, two random messages from betting sites, one from a supermarket, and occasionally one from my governor. This is not counting the ones I received from Uber, Chicken Inn from the one time I ordered food, the ones that come in every time you call someone with a Skiza Tune, and the ones that accompany each M-Pesa transaction. At some point, I decided that this was now being overdone. It was time to block all promotional messages.
Endless Promotions
I'm not a lawyer, and I have very little knowledge in data and data privacy, but even I can tell that our information is becoming a little bit too available in the Kenyan market. The ability of some of these promotional material to target specific groups - My dad rarely receives betting messages, while I receive a couple every week, and my mom gets callers that try to swindle money out of her due to the nature of her business - is somewhat frightening. This raises the question of the strength of data privacy laws in Kenya.
I deleted my social media accounts five years ago. The final straw was when I realized I had a thousand followers on Instagram, and knew less than fifty of them. This was compounded by the switch in the prioritization of items in the news feed, with the app switching from displaying the most recent posts of friends to ones a celebrity posted two days ago. Something about that rubbed me off the wrong way. It was only after I got 'clean' of social media that I began seeing the black hole we've allowed ourselves to be pulled into. I realized that to these giant companies, we are not the customers, but the raw material. Ask yourself, 'How does Google make $140 Billion a year, yet we never pay for any of their services.'
Nothing Is Ever Free
I'm not going to tell anyone that social media is the devil. I've tried that before, and it does not fly well. Social media does have its merits. Major ones. The ability of Twitter to gather and encourage public opinion is something of a marvel. People have been connected in different parts of the world. Communication is free. But as I've come to realize, for any company beholden to its shareholders, you as a customer are nothing but a money making machine. Nothing is ever free.
Behavioral data is a goldmine for any company - what you look at in the supermarket, what links you click on in a site, which videos you watch on YouTube, what searches you make on Google - are all used to predict and to some extent, control behavior. The more Facebook knows about your habits, the more they can curate content to those habits, the result being you spending more time on the app. This ensures that you come across advertisements, which you might click on (since even these are tied to your interests), and this is where the money is.
If you don't feel some kind of aversion to this kind of behavior, then forgive me for wasting your time. I do however think this is an dangerous game being played, and Kenyan companies are slowly learning how to tap into it. I'm getting tired of receiving messages from god knows who every thirty minutes.
So What?
I challenge you to go to your messages and see how many such messages are at the top of your chats. Unless you're some kind of Casanova, I'm willing to bet three of your top five messages are some promotion you care nothing about. Behavioral data might be difficult to understand , but your messaging application being bogged down is probably a good start. Privacy laws in Kenya should be in the mainstream media. However, given the oldies in government, I highly doubt it will.