Be more vigilant to protect free speech

There’s a story I tell my staff, and younger journalists, sometimes, when trying to encourage them to pick up the phone and interview people. Apparently, it’s shocking.
The story is about how, when I began in journalism, there was no Internet. Believe it: we still ran newspapers, we still gathered information.

Yet, when the Internet did arrive in our newsrooms, we lauded it, universally. It was the rise of open information. Few of us foresaw the battle now emerging for our own information, and to control information.

Yet, as the world now moves a dozen different ways on information, it seems as if the character of each legislative approach speaks profoundly to national priorities.

In the UK, where a new data privacy law comes into force this year, the government has worked hard to support consumer data rights in every kind of commercial interface, while actively opening all our data for State use.

We have the right to know what information our banks, for instance, gather and keep on us, and how they use the information. At the same time, the government has the right to see the browsing history of any one of us, our medical data, and far more: simply everything.

That has stopped terrorist attacks, and benefits fraud, we are told. And so, we live monitored, to ensure we aren’t planning criminal attacks on the innocent, or claiming false allowances, in a dual-track beast, protecting commercially, and exposing to the State absolutely.

Yet, in all, our freedom of speech is sacrosanct, curbed only by long-in-place and reasonable laws banning libel, where anyone’s reputation is damaged through published falsehoods.

In East Africa, by contrast, we have yet to see a law built to protect consumers commercially, while government access to our data is ad hoc, endemic, and largely unregulated. Moreover, Internet control is also emerging as a new tool to control freedom of speech.

Thus, in Tanzania, new legislation has brought registration and licence fees for bloggers that few will afford. Blogging is a breadline existence. The global price structure that has captured our advertising market via the global monopolies of Google and others delivers only cents to bloggers: it’s a scratched existence.

So there it is, for now, Tanzania = bloggers diminished.

In Uganda, and forgive me if I’ve not fully understood the nature of the proposed ‘What’s App Tax’, the idea is to tax social media use, but not for science homework. The type of use will be tax-free or taxed, is the idea, and anything about politics will get taxed. So two down: Tanzania and Uganda, both, are chasing limiting rights of speech and raising extra revenue in their passed and forthcoming legislation.

READ: Yoweri Museveni slaps taxes on social media users in Uganda

As for Kenya, previous efforts to achieve online content licences foundered many years ago, although they were gazetted, but quietly blocked and overturned by our media owners, to the benefit of our now huge array of bloggers.

But data privacy? Whatever for? We have truly none. And our freedom of speech is a shaky space, clouded by self-censorship and compromised integrity.

So what is the answer for we consumers as we pick through this array and head off damage in this information cloud?

Few have failed to follow the Cambridge Analytica story, outlining the gathering of personal data to target ads at us to influence our voting. In the US, the government is on it. In the UK too. In Kenya, named explicitly as an affected party, our government is not.

Nowhere, have consumers stayed private from the State. But do commerce and political parties, too, have the right to access all our personal information — yes or no?

That should be an issue. And not one solely chucked to a court by opposition. Why aren’t we pushing for legislation on this too?

Freedom of speech is a constitutional right. We can never let go of it.

But data protection we have allowed to be a gaping hole in our legislative agenda, throughout East Africa: and it shouldn’t be.