WorldStage Newsonline– The Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) , Kashifu Abdullah has accused big tech companies of feasting on tech users’ personal data as income, saying consumers supposed to know what are being done with their data.
Speaking at a virtual press briefing on the National Privacy Week 2021 and unveiling of the week’s activities, Abdullahi, said “Big Tech are using our personal data to make money, we are the commodity so how can we protect our data, how can we know what the data processor controller is doing with our data, and also we should have the right of deleting unknowingly what he is going to do with our data’ the Director General alleged.”
He dropped hint of a deadline for data controllers and processors to file in their annual data audit report on15th march, 2021, adding that no-filling was a punishable offence and “and we are set to fully enforce this provision this year.
Data privacy day is aimed at creating awareness in order to inform millions of people on how their personal information is being used or shared in our digital society, to ensure that individual data are being protected. In Nigeria, NITDA had issued a draft Data protection Guidelines since 2013, with the objective of providing a basic law to guide the use of data in the digital space. However, when the EU GDPR was issued in 2016, the then Director General of NITDA, Dr. Isa Pantami, constituted a team to review the draft guideline in the light of global development and also to provide Nigerians with a practicable law for its implementation.
On data controllers filling, he said, “Our enforcement is not about giving fine, making money it’s about getting people to understand why we are doing this, regulator also to see how they can improve their business because when you talk about digital economy, digital economy is all about trust, your customers need to trust your platform to use it, how can they trust it? The only way they can trust it is by convincing them that you comply with this kind of regulation. So we have a way of enforcing it through a financial fines or blacklisting an organization from a public sector project, we can easily achieve through our IT clearance
“Data sovereignty is about bringing our data especially government data into the country, our objectives with that is to create local content to encourage multinationals to come and invest in hybrid cloud in the country and make sure we have our data within our jurisdiction, which we have achieved a lot, in that more than 90% of our data are now in country.”
According to him, the NDPR basically focuses more on data protection, saying, “when you look at privacy, privacy is very broad but data protection is part of the Data privacy in general.
“The regulatory instrument was created to follow suit of what is happening globally after the GDPR, but also we are to innovate in our way. How can we use it to create prosperity not just regulation? How can we use the instruments to create an industry to create profession and also train our people? that is why we had a license regime to it, we license over 70 data compliance organisations and they have created thousands of jobs and also have created an industry worth N2 billion.”
