Kenya’s business districts are no longer safe. The past few weeks have seen story upon story of citizens bearing the brunt of a city gone lawless and rogue, mugged and robbed in broad daylight without much action from the police.
Pedestrians are increasingly in danger because the attackers may number in the tens with probable accomplices lurking in the crowds ready to intervene should things go south.
We often hear of these stories on social media following the posting of security footage. Wild fires of condemnation ensue as the videos go viral and as expected the local government will make a statement and launch a salvo to appease the city’s residents, promising investigations.
I find that government keeps missing an opportunities to really connect with the citizens in a positive way and cement the place and purpose of technology.
Even as we wait for policy and legislation such as the Data Protection Bill to find footing, government must actively apply themselves toward creating goodwill among the citizens by showcasing, and very visibly at that, the benefits of some of the programmes it is rolling out.
Case in point: these young thugs are not savvy and employ the use of brute force and sheer numbers. In most of the incidents that you will witness, the perpetrators disappear into some backstreet or, shockingly, simply cross the road and mingle with the crowds. Often times the only disguise is a cap or hoodie.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence have come a long way with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alibaba among others making both the compute power and algorithms readily available for the creation of smart solutions that could be applied to the menace we are facing.
Last year, China rolled out ‘Skynet’ that has more than 20 million smart cameras as part of its platform make up. The demo video with accurate facial recognition and additional metadata is sure to send initial chills down your spine when you extrapolate what it can be used for.
I am a proponent of smart privacy that looks at unlocking value from personal identifying data. It is about time we had this conversation at national level and agree on a way forward.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
