Safaricom is making moves to monetize the vast amount of customer data it holds.
The Kenya-based telco giant is looking to pre-qualify suppliers of a location tracking and intelligence platform thus hinting at it potentially monetizing data.
Safaricom has called for bids for the services which would allow the telco to develop customer profiles based on their locations and phone usage patterns.
The bid notice read, “Safaricom has enjoyed rapid growth since her inception largely driven by the innovation and delivery of new and sophisticated services riding on telephony and data services.”
“Consequently, the evolution of the mobile network and devices has enabled Safaricom to gather information from the connected devices. At the core of any reliably connected device is an accurate location intelligence system.”
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Should Safaricom make this move it would join firms in various industries such as retailers, insurance and financial services. These use location intelligence data to map consumer behavior.
As for customer data privacy and security, the Data Protection Act, passed in 2019 provides guidelines as to how consumer data should be handled businesses and medical institutions.
The law prohibits the sharing or sale of personal data. Offenders of this law could see themselves faced with a 5 year jail term or fined US$ 50,000.
This law is primarily applicable to banks, telcos, media groups, retailers, hospitals and hotels, since they handle vast amounts of private customer information.
