Kenya’s ICT regulator, the Communications Authority (CA), has clarified that proposed SIM registration guidelines won’t demand organic identifiers comparable to DNA or blood kind, regardless of earlier studies suggesting in any other case.
The clarification comes after per week of business anxiousness and public outcry sparked by media studies that claimed SIM card holders would want to offer DNA data, together with authorized definitions that raised fears of state surveillance.
The CA mentioned the Kenya Info and Communications (Registration of Telecommunications Service Subscribers) Laws, 2025, solely outline “biometric information” broadly, stressing that the wording is technical and doesn’t require operators to gather that data.
“This definition doesn’t imply that each one this data will probably be collected from subscribers throughout registration of SIM playing cards,” the CA mentioned in a Tuesday assertion seen by TechCabal. “As a matter of reality, the Authority has not issued any directive to licencees to gather this information.”
For operators like Safaricom, the dominant participant in Kenya with a 65.1% market share in SIM subscriptions, the regulatory atmosphere stays ambiguous. The preliminary gazettement of the foundations threatened to put telcos in a precarious double bind, dealing with fines of as much as KES million ($7,700) or jail phrases for non-compliance, whereas concurrently risking violations of the nation’s strict Information Safety Act, which champions information minimisation.
The CA’s clarification highlights the fragile balancing act dealing with African regulators as they try and digitise their economies whereas curbing cybercrime. The regulator argues the tightened guidelines are important to fight id theft and “SIM field” fraud, which undermines the integrity of cellular cash ecosystems.
Regardless of the clarification, the inclusion of physiological traits within the regulatory textual content has unsettled privateness authorized consultants, who argue that codifying such definitions creates a authorized framework for future overreach, no matter present intent.
Two authorized analysts, Oscar Onsarigo and Dennis Wambugu, advised TechCabal that the wording leaves room for future calls for. Onsarigo mentioned it opens area for later necessities even when none are deliberate now, whereas Wambugu added that “it creates a path a later administration might use to hunt extra intrusive information.”
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