User-perspectives on digital privacy in sub-Sahara Africa –
An Information Science project by Mehmet Çetin, supervised by Anna Bon, co-supervision by Simbarashe Maguchu (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) – January- June 2024
Digital privacy is one of the major issues in our Digital Society. Misuse of personal data, financial loss, cyberbullying, are a few examples what can be the result of exposing personal data, in the absence of a good digital protection framewok. To address digital privacy issues, digital privacy laws have recently been enacted in various countries, e.g. GDPR was enacted in 2018 in Europe. Ideally, privacy laws should protect citizens, but has this assumption been this validated by user-studies. In this research we assess user perspectives on privacy regulations in two Sub-Sahara countries, Rwanda and Ghana through comparative use case studies. Taking the European GDPR as the starting point, we will explore user perspective, taking into account how users perceive digital privacy in two African countries. Based on the expected outcomes, we will formulate a framework of policy recommendations how to improve implementation of data privacy for users in low-resource environments.
