The Kenyan High Court has allowed users of the telecommunication network, Safaricom, to join in a class action suing the service provider over access to people’s bank details.
The class action is against the telecoms provider over a clause in the SIM card registration rules in its terms and condition to users.
What Is A Class Action Suit?
A class action is a suit that allows one or many other people to sue an entity on behalf of a much larger group.
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According to this suit, the defendant stands the risk of paying all the aggrieved consumers a compensation if those suing it succeed.
Consequently, should the suit become successful in favour of the network users, Safaricom will have to pay all its users a compensation fee.
Safaricom’s 58 page terms and condition document allows the company to collect the bank details of mobile phone users.
Particularly in its Clause 3.2.1 in the data privacy statement, Safaricom mandated its subscribers to agree to the terms which allows it to “collect and store information including credit or debit card information, information on bank account numbers, Swift codes or other banking information”.
Granting the class action that allows users to join the class action, High Court judge, Chacha Mwita granted the plea by Wilfred Nderitu and Charles Kanjama who are two senior counsels to invite other users to join in suing the telecom company.
The judge directed the lawyers to publish a notice in a daily newspaper, inviting Kenyans who may wish to join the suit.
Although Safaricom opposed the class action, the counsels maintained that Safaricom having access to users’ bank details is illegal.
“As such, the stringent mechanisms and crafty ways of collecting data without assurance of data security are precipitated by the thought that its clients have no option but to opt-in for them to continue enjoying the products and services that it offers,” Mr Nderitu said.
Safaricom’s customer, Businessman Abdi Zeila, sued the telecom company, including the Kenyan Communications regulator, Communication Authority (CA) over failure to protect his privacy, leading to a SIM Swap fraud that made him lose millions of shillings when a hacker drained his banks using his SIM.
The complainant said both CA and Safaricom failed to provide services that are secure from fraudsters.
The case is pending before the court and the court will mention it in March.
According to the terms and condition document, Clause 3.2.1 says Safaricom would collect the personal financial information of users.
Mr Nderitu said in an affidavit filed in court that Safaricom which is a telecommunications giant “is aware of its market dominance and widespread use across the country. Further, it is aware that it has the biggest customer base among the telecommunications companies in Kenya, further leading to high reliance by the citizenry.”
He said having been a registered user of the service, he was not supposed to get a fake prompts urging him to provide details of his information when he had done that the first time he registered.
He said scammers used that method to gain access to his bank account and drained all her money.
This suit further questions the terms and condition pages of all other telecom companies like MTN, Airtel, etc.
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