Statement: R2K wants answers from the Privacy Watchdog!
On Friday, R2K and our partners – The Centre for Environmental Rights, Public Service Accountability Monitor, and the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute wrote a letter to the Office of the Information Regulator to inquire about its operations.
The Information Regulator is a cardinal institution in our democratic dispensation. It was established in 2016 in terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI). It’s core purpose is to promote access to information in line with the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) and to monitor and enforce compliance by public and private bodies to POPI.
In the letter, we took issue with the fact that in the communities in which we are present and amongst the different constituencies with whom we work, there is no visible sign of the existence of the Information Regulator. People do not even know that the Information Regulator exists. Furthermore, that in the past year there has been a deafening silence from the Information Regulator regarding issues of national significance in relation to the abuse of personal information of people.
Examples of this includes the use of personal information of people by political parties who send unsolicited and unwanted bulk messages to the population. In the letter we also alerted the Information Regulator to its failure to respond to a complaint that R2K sent on 19 October 2017 regarding the Master deeds Data Breach. In October last year, security researcher Troy Hunt reported the breach of a database that has now been revealed to contain the sensitive personal information of more than 60 million people, living and dead. The database contains government-issued ID numbers, email address, phone numbers, as well as information about marital status, employment, and property ownership. In total, Hunt has reported that the database contains 60,323,827 rows of data with unique South African identity numbers. This is said to be the biggest data breach in SA history.
Finally, the letter poses critical questions to the Information Regulator regarding its operations and its ability to fulfill its mandate. It is crucial that all of South Africa knows exactly in what state is the Information Regulator – does it have the human and financial resources to fulfill its mandate?; how many complaints have been lodged with it to date and what steps has it taken towards those complaints?
#OngaziMakazi!
Read the full letter here.
