Abstract
Social media generates massive amount of big data from users, the penetration of these platforms in Africa creates meaningful insights around customer needs and behaviour from the data. This helps to create new businesses that rebalance the technology and wealth gap in the continent. With every gigabytes of data generated brings about exploitation of customer data. Data Privacy becomes a focal point of concern. The global approaches to privacy for the users of social media platforms is still evolving but two jurisdictions have set a standard. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Californian Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have provisions that are built on sustaining consumer consent and enabling consumers to be forgotten or have their consented data deleted at their own request. More so the exponential growth of the internet in Africa highlights the explosion of big data and there is a need to study its regulatory approaches in relation to the global best practices symbolized by the GDPR and the CCPA. The Paper reviews the African regulatory landscape and its approach to Big Data and possible vulnerable angles that exposes data of Africans on these social media platforms. It is clear that in spite of a continental treaty and a reasonable number of African countries with Data Privacy laws, these laws are in most of the countries either not built on strong legal grounds or lack an independent enforcement mechanism. Therefore the African approach leaves a lot of open issues and there is a need for a continental consensus on the best approach that will push through national legislations crept on a unifying continental model. Keywords : Big Data, Privacy, Regulatory, Social Media, Data analytics, Guidelines, rights DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-17-14 Publication date: June 30th 2020
Highlights
There has been a somewhat sudden move to Big Data and its many variables in the technological and connected world we live in
There has been a growing realization of the unique influence that Big Data can exert in providing priceless insights to any company, organization or government in planning and even implementation of business concepts or programmes that can rely on the accurate outputs of the analytics
It is indicative of the growing concern of governments across the globe that traditional data privacy and protection principles are showing patent weaknesses in meeting what can be concluded as an existential threat to the rights to privacy and data protection. Another good illustration is the Californian Consumer Privacy Act[3] in the United States and its attempt to upscale the regulatory landscape to meet the beclouding challenges of digitalization of data and its impact on lives of persons. The focus of this Paper is to review the African regulatory landscape and its reaction to the issues around Big Data and possible impact on its citizenry
Summary
There has been a somewhat sudden move to Big Data and its many variables in the technological and connected world we live in. There has been a growing realization of the unique influence that Big Data can exert in providing priceless insights to any company, organization or government in planning and even implementation of business concepts or programmes that can rely on the accurate outputs of the analytics This Paper will look at Big Data generated from three primary sources: social data, machine data and transactional data. It used Google as a good example and concludes that the company has used Big Data in tuning its search engine an algorithm to deploy data intensive services such as voice recognition, translation and location-based services The conclusion of this Report is in line with the postulation of Zheng, Vasilakos et al[6], where they state that there is a proliferation of devices like smart phones, mobile tablets, sensors, smart metres and smart appliances that feed from an increasing mobile data traffic on the internet. To further illustrate how the Big Data on the internet is gathered, the Table below highlights the daily and monthly usage of a select group of social media platforms as at the first Quarter of 2020
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