An Africa Business Community

RICA rocks

You may recall the fun we had when PAIA (in the SKYA, as we termed it) was launched - the clumsily named Promotion of Access to Information Act which, after five deadline shifts, was implemented in such a watered-down version that it serves very little or no purpose. Now RICA has hit our shores and is likely to have, at best, only irritation value.
The Regulation of Interception of Communication-Related Information Act (Rica), which came into force last week, have been slammed by experts, who are concerned about the ‘severe’ privacy implications of the law. Operators now have to obtain the full name, address and identity number of customers buying SIM cards for prepaid services. According to a report in the Sunday Tribune, MTN, Vodacom and Cell C have been given 18 months to get this information from customers. However, it says, only Cell C has been able to commit to this period.
Street vendors are also not employing fax machines and sophisticated filing systems as far as I could ascertain.
The report quotes Gus Hosein, a senior fellow of human rights watchdog Privacy International, as saying the retention of users' information is ‘an absolutely useless policy that introduces more problems than it solves’. And Charles Goredema, head of organised crime research at the Institute of Security Studies in Cape Town, is quoted as saying he failed to see ‘any link between (the legislation) and combating organised crime’. He told the paper the new law ‘contravened the right to privacy’ and that the idea was to widen the amount of information accessible to police with no specific end other than to hoard as much data as possible. He suggested that the new measures could, in fact, increase crime. Criminals might be able to conduct business hiding behind the identity of the owner of the cell phone they had stolen.
It has all the symptoms of becoming an expensive waste of resources. As Mandy van Coller, a Moonstone compliance officer in PE suggested, perhaps they should call the exercise "Costa Rica."
With thanks to Paul Kruger & Moonstone Monitor