Instagram is widely rolling out a new feature branded Instagram Reels, in their app, that will see the application compete for users with TikTok as the services offered are identical. However, so far, the service is geographically limited and only available in a few countries.

So far, Reels has only been rolled out in India, Germany and France. In the next few weeks (early August), Instagram will see the feature in the United States market, and then 50 other countries. In that period, the feature will still not be available worldwide. Instagram Reels launched in India, just after the country banned the App and several other Chinese Apps.

With the growing popularity of the Chinese app, known for creating and shot clips, Zuckerberg months ago tried to buy TikTok, but it was not selling. He them embarked on damaging the Apps fame, accusing the company of being in bed with the Chinese Government, and sharing user data.

After the failed attempt to buy TikTok, Facebook would later be seen replicating the App, leading to the birth of Lasso. Lasso failed to compete with TikTok that was already billions of downloads away. A few weeks ago, Facebook abandoned Lasso, and made the decision to focus of Instagram Reels.

Reels is an Instagram feature, only available in a few countries in the world. With Reels, Facebook sees potential for its growth to wider users as all that would be needed is just an update, and the millions of users with Instagram will automatically be having Reels enabling the wide spread access that Lasso failed to achieve.

The feature allows users to share 15 second long clips from their Instagram Stories feature. One can set background music to their videos, or make their own audios to add to the videos. It also has a countdown timer to enable a user adjust video speed.

The videos can be shared directly on Instagram Stories, sent directly to a specific user in their DMs or added to a new Reels tab on a user’s profile. It also comes with an Instagram Explore tab where the most viral videos are shared.

It is not yet certain when Instagram Reels will be launching world wide, but according to the growing country roll outs, it might not be long before the whole world receives the feature. It is also not certain whether the App will actually outcompeting TikTok, or it will always be

Twitter has this week been awash with news about hacks of accounts of many prominent users including former president Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Must, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg and the company Apple. The hacks originated from creators who were promoting a bitcoin scam that saw them (the scammers) earn nearly USD. 120,000.

Guru8 has learned that in retaliation for the attacks, the social media giant on Thursday made the decision to lock Twitter accounts of all users that had changed or even attempted to change their passwords in the last 30 days, and delivered on that decision.

According to Twitter, a total of 130 accounts were targeted in the scam where the scammers were able to gain access to these accounts and send out tweets.

“Out of an abundance of caution, and as part of our incident response yesterday to protect people’s security, we took the step to lock any accounts that had attempted to change the account’s password during the past 30 days”, read the statement released by the Twitter Support account on Thursday.

“Other than the accounts that are still locked, people should be able to reset their password now”, adds the statement revealing that the users that have not been locked out of their accounts, can successfully reset their passwords if they need to.

The company has not yet revealed when or how the affected accounts will be recovered, however, the statement provides that the company is working on helping the affected persons regain their accounts again if they were “proactively locked”, which process may take a while due to the “extra steps” being taken to grant “access to the rightful owner”.

The other measures being implemented include disabling the downloading of twitter data for all accounts while the investigations are ongoing,

MTN Uganda has entered into a partnership with SIMPLY Africa, another subsidiary of the MTN Group and they have today launched what they call a “SuperApp” Ayoba to “enable customers to access more affordable communication”. These revelations were made in a press statement that MTN released today.

A SuperApp is an app that provides a lot of services, like the way Safe Boda allows one to order a ride, food and shop, buy airtime, and deliver a package. Ayoba as a SuperApp allows to send messages, make voice calls, access several channels including music and a yet to be launched “money transfer” feature.

The application, described as “a Pan African messaging platform, built by Africans for Africans”, at the time of launch is only available for Android users, as a iOS version is still in the works. As an African app, it is available in some of the African languages including Swahili, Luganda, Hausa, isiXhosa and Yoruba, and comes with end to end encryption to protect chats from prying eyes. It has channels on sports, fashion, cooking, health, and games.

MTN sells that the app is unlike any other messageing app in that is allows one to chat app to SMS and SMS to app “with anyone regardless of whether they have the ayoba app or not.” Among the features of the service is that it allows to send and receive text messages, voice messages, videos, images, audio and other files with any of your contacts while using a mobile internet connection.

However, as a promotion for the product, MTN customers will not need to have internet to use the App as they can use it free of charge up to 1GB of data every month. The other feature in the app, is the possibility to initiate voice calls with contacts, however, these will be charged basing on the standard voice calls using airtime or minutes.

While announcing the partnership, the Chief Executive Officer of MTN, Wim Vanhellepute was quoted as saying

 “We are keen to see Africa actively participate in the global digital revolution that is now being further accelerated by the Covid-19 situation. Innovation and the connectivity that goes with it, are particularly key to our digital proposition. They are both crucial in our contribution to the social and economic transformation of our country”, he said.

On the side of Ayoba, while speaking about this partnership, David Gilarranz CEO of SIMFY AFRICA said,

“We are delighted to partner with MTN in Uganda and to offer its customers the ability to use the app with no data costs. In the coming weeks, our app will surely become a super app as we will be adding more features, like mobile money and music, as well as allowing other apps to co-exist in Ayoba. We would like to take this opportunity to thank MTN Uganda for trusting our journey”.

How to get ayoba:

Step 1: Visit MyMTN app www.mtn.co.ug/mymtn open the app and select Ayoba

Step 2: Select your preferred download option and click on “Download Now”

Step 3: When prompted to, select “allow from this source” and install app.

Step 4: Open the app and sign up to start chatting for FREE

The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) last year released renewal license regulations for telecommunications companies in Uganda which included the compulsory listing of 20% of shares of the said companies in the first 2 years of their license renewal.

Friday last week, saw MTN Uganda (MTN) and UCC sign a license renewal agreement for a period of 12 years commencing 1^st July 2020 after paying a total of USD 100 million approximately UGX. 371.5 billion which the MTN said to have paid in full for the license.

However, among the conditions stated in the agreement signed included the requirement that MTN complies with the sector policy, regulations and guidelines requiring the listing of a portion of its shares on the Uganda Security exchange. The portion was identified by the regulator UCC as 20% of its ownership, and according to Bloomberg, local ownership in the company from Ugandans only stands at 4%.

To have MTN launch an initial public offering (IPO), will see that ownership stake of Ugandans increase, and the same will be for transparency in the company given part of it will be in public domain.

Below is the summary of the other terms and conditions that were agreed upon by UCC and MTN. However, some of these will also extend to other telecommunication companies in Uganda, depending on which one next applies for a license renewal upon expiry. These conditions were also included in the national broadband policy that the Regulator (UCC) released in 2018.

The other terms and conditions include that MTN ensures thats its network extends to, and that its services are available in at least 90% of the geographical boundary of Uganda within five years from the date of the license, that it does not deny access to licensed services to any subscriber except for non – payment of fees or any other just cause, it ensures that its services meet the UCC’s quality of service standards and other standards as the licensor shall determine from time to time and that it also complies with all the laws, regulations, guidelines and standards issued by the government of Uganda on health, safety and environment protection.

Further, that MTN shall provide services that are adaptable to persons with disabilities across its network, ensure that its equipment, facilities, or systems do not damage, interfere or in any way harm the installations, facilities or operations of other licensees, ensure and maintain the confidentiality of all communications that it may obtain in the course of providing a service to a customer or interconnecting to a public network or in the execution of its business.

MTN is also required to further interconnect its systems with national, public or private telecommunication systems or other licensed operators to deliver locally originated traffic through interconnection agreements, which shall be approved upon by the parties, share its infrastructure with other requesting licensees in designated areas as provided by the UCC Act, Regulations, Government Policies, guidelines and directives, comply with the Act, regulations made under that act, standards, directives and guidelines issued by UCC in the public interest, including by not limited to national development, consumer protection, environment protection, disaster relief services and security of persons and infrastructure.

And finally, MTN is authorized a non – exclusivity, to establish, install, operate, maintain lease, and sale telecommunications system and to provide telecommunication services and make available network infrastructure systems to other licensed operators and authorized persons in Uganda.

An NGO in Uganda, the Unwanted Witness has published “evidence – based” findings from their research under the title “Trading Privacy for a Cheap Transport System” where they report that Safe Boda (Company) has violated and continues to violate the Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 (DPPA) by failing to be compliant with the said Act, and by sharing users’ personal data with third parties, however they fail to provide empirical evidence of the breaches of personal data by the Company.

The report also makes references to the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulations of 2018 a.k.a the GDPR. The GDPR is the EU version of the Ugandan DPPA, and most of the provisions (if not all) in the Ugandan Act are inspired by the GDPR.

The Organization claims to base their findings in their own examinations of the app, and in the review of the privacy policy of Safe Boda (older and the updated versions), which they compared with the way the application operated on the market. They state to have identified a number of discrepancies some of which will be summarised here.

Safe Boda is accused of sharing information like location data, phone numbers, emails and names, among other personal information that can be used to identify a user.

The Act (the DPPA) that they quote defines personal information (read data) to include information about a person “from which the person can be identified” (emphasis in the quoted texts) and includes nationality, age, marital status, educational level, occupation among others, and the information from their own findings fall short of identifiable personal data. Section 7 of the DPPA on which the entirety of the report lies, provides for the protection of persona data and privacy, however, that evidence of personal data breaches are yet to be identified from the organization’s report.

It should be noted that the Organization’s actual evidence of personal data breaches is not presented. The findings refer to attached screenshots shared in the report of the alleged data breaches. The Organization accuses Safe Boda of sharing personal information with Facebook, however, from their own study in the published screenshots, the only information that they reveal to be shared with Facebook is general information such as the phone type, operating system, the country, screen size and the location details but nothing to indicate the name of the user, phone number or email or other user identifiable information that is actually captured and shared with Facebook.

The report states that the Organization raised the issue of sharing data with Facebook and states that Safe Boda later stopped sharing the data with the social media company, but instead adopted other third party apps like Clevertap to continue the data mining. Their evidence of personal data breaches using Clevertap arise from their reliance on the publications of Privacy International which state that the app (Clevertap) stores the phone type, contact, email address, location, time zone, user-names, email address and their carrier (ISP). However, when you consider their own published findings as revealed in the screenshots, the only information shared and captured by Clevertap is the phone build, operator, phone make, model, operating system SDK version etc, none of which includes the name, email, phone number to be able identify the user behind the device. All this information is generic data that would enable the proper functionalities of an application.

Regarding the privacy policy and whether or not it was in tandem with the DPPA, they reveal that “our findings showed that the Safe Boda privacy policy was not clear and (that) some of its provisions did not seem to be entirely in line with the Data Protection Act 2019 and internationally recognized data protection standards” especially because the requirement to inform the user what their data is being used for, and that consent was not sought before information is used or shared.

The Organization also quotes clause 12.1.2 of the Privacy Policy of Safe Boda but fails to provide the full context for which the provision is stated under the Safe Boda website to be able to give an informed analysis, just like the convenient reading of scripture. Whereas the excerpt in the report refers to Safe Boda sharing information with third parties, the full text on the website refers to the information that Safe Boda gets from third parties and what the company does with that Safe Boda. Failure to give full context has been known to give the Bible or the Quran distorted interpretation.

The report faults Safe Boda for failing to include retention periods in their policy to enable the data subjects to ascertain how long their data will be stored by the Company as is required under section 18 (1) of the DPPA. However, to note, section 18 (1) does not speak to retention periods of data and not the section quoted. The section above provides that personal data is not to be kept for a a period longer than is necessary, but not a requirement for a retention period for non identifiable personal data.

A possibility of a biased research may be implied from the research because the report is targeted towards one ride hailing app, however, the organization has clarified in their findings that they chose Safe Boda because it was “Uganda’s leading transport application”. Maybe it is not enough to dispel bias in their findings, as inconsistencies in previous and current privacy policies and non personal data are not evidence of data breaches under the DPPA.

MTN Uganda has today released a press statement where it has announced and launched a new campaign under the theme “Keep some MTN MoMo on your phone. It saves” to encourage its “customers to keep some money with MTN MoMo on their phones”, stating that it is very “convenient, safe” to have some balance within the App. This MTN says could come in handy in rescuing the customers in emergency situations most especially during these times of COVID 19 and the antecedent curfew where shops are closed.

In the released statement about the campaign, MTN continues to restate the convenience of using MTN MoMo system to pay for products and services like “airtime, voice and data bundles, Yaka electricity units, national water, school fees, shopping and much more” as an alternative to using physical cash to make the same payments physically.

“This new campaign” states Stephen Mutana, the General Manager, Mobile Financial Services at MTN “is about encouraging our customers to keep some MTN MoMo on their phones, because it saves”. Withing the MTN MoMo, a customer can make a deposit as low as UGX. 500.

Mutana however, while he encourages using MoMo, cautions customers against sharing their PINs with persons other than themselves in order to make sure that their accounts are protected at all times.