Safaricom to Start Hiding Lipa Na M-Pesa Customers’ Full Details Starting This Date.
Safaricom has announced that it will start hiding the full details of customers making payments through Lipa na M-Pesa in an attempt to make to curb the sale of user information to advertising or fraudsters.
Customers making payments through Lipa na M-Pesa will now have a security assurance after Safaricom telecommunications company made this major announcement.
Safaricom has assured its customers that by the end of June 2022, the it will start hiding full details of the customers making payments via Lipa na M-Pesa.
This move according to Safaricom is meant to limit third-party usage of customers’ data after it has been revealed that more than a fifth of Kenyan businesses shared customers’ financial and personal information without their consent.
The step is in accordance with the data protection law enacted in 2019 to protect user privacy, a model used by banks when sending account numbers.
Safaricom telecommunications company has now announced that only the first name and a few digits of the customer’s phone numbers shall be displayed while making payments, in a bid to curb the trading of personal information to fraudsters.
“By the end of June, phone numbers and full names of subscribers making transactions will no longer be relayed to partners,” Safaricom told Business Daily media team.
For example, if a person named James Maunde Otochi with a phone number +254704 004005 makes a payment the only data that will be passed along is [James, +2547XXXXX005].
Currently, customers/subscribers using the Lipa na M-Pesa platform leave their full contact details and names exposed to the respective merchants owning the till numbers.
Over time this has posed a high security risk as merchants are said to use the numbers to send unsolicited advertising through text messages, or even sold to third parties.
A survey conducted by Ernst & Young (EY) has revealed that more than 41 per cent of Kenyan firms shared customer data with third-party service providers without customers’ knowledge.
