Safaricom is set to introduce a feature that will hide Customers details when making payments by the end of June 2022 to curb personal information being traded to advertisers or fraudsters .
The move comes amid revelations that more than a fifth of Kenyan companies shared customers’ financial and personal information without consent.
According to the Telco, only the first name and a few digits of the customer’s phone numbers shall be displayed while making payments.
“Only the first name will be passed along and the phone number of the subscriber making the transaction will be masked (obfuscated). For example, if a person named John Doe with a phone number +254(redacted) makes a payment the only data that will be passed along is [John, +2547XXXXX654].”
Currently, customers using the Lipa na M-Pesa platform leave their numbers and names to the respective merchants owning the till numbers.
This created a high security risk as merchants are said to use the numbers to send unsolicited advertising through text messages, or even sold to third parties.
The data protection law enacted in 2019 guarantees the right to user privacy, a model used by banks when sending account numbers.
A survey by consultancy Ernst & Young (EY) shows that 41 percent of firms transferred their clients’ data to third-party service providers.
