WAR ON AIRTEL DATA FRAUD! City lawyer wins round one as saga takes new twist
EARLY GAINS AGAINST AIRTEL AFFIRM CASE FOR CONSUMERS PUSHBACK
By John Musiime
Over twenty (20) Ugandan professionals spanning telecommunications and electronics engineering, big data, media, communications, strategy, tax, customer care and law have now joined me in our consumer self-help pushback against Internet Service Providers in Uganda and the sell-out Uganda Communications Commission (“UCC”).
Airtel is just the starting point.
We have made early gains and we need every consumer’s participation to see through the reforms we seek and deserve.
After our first physical meeting on 24 September 2022, I emailed Airtel on 26 September 2022, requesting them for my data usage logs for the 10 and 11 September 2022.
On 29 September 2022, they sent me what they said are the logs in a manually generated Excel spreadsheet in four sheets.
Even if the Excel sheets had many shortcomings as I will illustrate later, I think that just getting them via email was an important early victory and a step towards the desired destination for Uganda data consumers.
Airtel and therefore all ISPs can no longer impose on consumers the disempowering and disabling requirement to put their request for data usage logs in manual writing and only to obtain them from a single physical location in Uganda.
As they gave me mine via email, there is no reason they should not give you yours via email or social media.
The Excel sheets had many material errors.
For example, instead of 2.2 GB, they suggested I had bought a bundle of 2.2 MB. Airtel sells no such bundle and the difference between the two numbers is 2,198.2 MB.
The data was convoluted and illogical. The times of the transactions in issue were arranged randomly rather than chronologically. To make sense of them, one had to export and re-arrange the sheets.
The Excel sheets do not show a click-by-click time stamped account of what websites I visited, how long I stayed on them and therefore how much data I spent where.
Instead of the two days I specifically requested, Airtel’s logs covered eleven days 1 September to 11 September 2022. This was a gross violation of my human and Constitutional right to privacy. It was also a blatant breach of section 9, 10, 12, 14 and 15 of the Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019.
Section 14 of that Act specifically legislates the principle of minimality in data processing. It provides that a data controller or data processor shall process only necessary and relevant personal data.
It further bars data controllers and processors from processing data that is more than that authorized by law or necessary for a specified purpose.
What happened here is that Airtel extracted data relating to my internet usage for eleven rather than the two I had specifically requested.
They unmasked it, removed its anonymity, and passed it through the hands of various employees whose number I cannot tell.
Four GB worth of internet activity over eleven days is huge and given that internet usage is a very private matter, I feel very personally violated by Airtel. The trouble is they do not seem to recognize the magnitude of this egregious affront to my privacy.
The Excel sheets proved to be inaccurate, incomplete, unauthenticated and unfit for the purpose for which I sought them.
In our subsequent meeting on Friday, 30 September 2022, we told Airtel that unlike all Uganda telecoms, Kenya’s Safaricom, empowers their customers to query the system and receive real time data statements by the mere push of a simple SSD code *544#.
The statement is similar to a bank statement showing the amount bought, data delivered and used. The Safaricom menu also has a data manager and high usage alerts. The entire data is anonymized and no person inside safaricom has an opportunity to pry into a user’s private internet activity.
It would be a case of gross incompetence if Uganda telecos honchos are unaware of these customer empowering features of the Safaricom customer experience. It is information in the public domain.
The obvious conclusion is that telcos in Uganda have not adopted these best practices and tools because doing so means closing the gaps they use to exploit consumers.The bedrock of consumer exploitation in Uganda is a corporate culture of disempowering, disenfranchising and being unaccountable to consumers.
ISPs in Uganda operate with the patronizing and nanny provider attitude where they believe it is their God given right to and only when forced, to provide them with their own analysis of data usage rather than the raw data. Even medical labs hand patients their results very technical though they might be. It is for the patient to seek a doctor’s interpretation if they so wish.
We were shocked when Airtel assured us that although it has these empowering tools and processes for its India market, we are amiss to expect the same treatment for Ugandan subscribers because we are far fewer than the one hundred thirty million it has in India!
I picked up a hint of racism in this sick and sickening attitude. Our consumer rights cannot depend on numbers. Given that Uganda’s entire population is only about forty two million, when shall we ever reach the one hundred thirty million subscribers threshold that Airtel expects us to meet before it accords us our basic consumers’ rights?
Airtel appears to have a big governance problem of marginalization of Ugandans in its ownership and top management.
This problem used to afflict Uganda in our commercial banking space. Before Herman Kasekende became Managing Director at Standard Chartered Bank, Ugandan bank CEOs were unheard of.Now we boast of Michael Mugabi at Housing Finance Bank, Anne Juuko at Stanbic, Mathias Katamba at DFCU and Fabian Kasi at Centenary bank among others.
MTN Uganda now has a woman CEO in Sylvia Mulinge. I do not see any prospect for any Ugandan heading Airtel soon. Like Bank of Baroda, we may have to accept Airtel as an Indian enclave in Uganda’s corporate space.
This is significant because corporate leaders who are not of the community in which the corporation operates can have the kind of expatriate mercenary attitude I saw in Airtel. Perhaps, if a CEO were our compatriot, he or she would feel our plight and see us as rights bearing fellow citizens rather than the faceless and emotionless numbers that Airtel seem to reduce us to.
Besides, both MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda record supernormal profits year in year out even in the current tough economic times. They take so much money from Uganda but are unwilling to make a small investment in technology and processes that empower customers.
When, later, another member of our team emailed Airtel for his own logs, Airtel provided them three days later. This time, the Excel spreadsheet came in two sheets as opposed to the four in which mine came. As expected, it covered a period much longer than that specifically requested by the data subject. The difference in the two sets of logs proved that Airtel’s so-called logs have no standard format.
When we asked other smaller Internet Service Providers for our data logs, they were more honest. They told us that they have no capacity to give us our data usage logs.
Airtel is clearly winging it. I shall not bother with the sleeping-on-the-job UCC. It has never seen the need to make it a requirement for ISPs to give users their data logs in real time, let alone set a standard format, which the logs must take. Just know that the legal thunder with which we are preparing to hit this treasonous Authority is still doing pushups.
A process that expects a user to email before they get their user logs is disempowering. It requires a consumer to take more time, more steps, more money, more energy, more technique requiring efforts such as sending an email to get what is essentially their rights i.e. accountability for their money, data, full and complete disclosure.
It is not feasible to provide users with their data logs by manually preparing Excel sheets if one considers that they can have thousands of requests in a day. Going this route proves that Airtel is not attending to the issues we raise in good faith and with the seriousness they deserve.
Dear reader, I need your help if they are to take us more seriously. You can help by requesting your data usage logs from your service provider for a period of your choosing via email or social media. It is important that we all request for very varied periods. If we can generate at least 1,000 requests, it should become clear to the telcos, if they did not already know, that the only way this can work is if they automate the process.
No consumer should be sending emails over something that they themselves can do by a simple push of an SSD code if the telcos provide the tool. It does not take too many lines of code to get this done and so many Ugandan developers can do it.
The writer is a lawyer and Advocate. Twitter:@jonekyoma
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