On March 31, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner confirmed in a formal letter that it has commenced suo moto investigations into privacy concerns related to Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, specifically the processing of personally identifiable information for the training of Meta's AI systems.Data Commissioner Immaculate Kassait's letter states: "The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner confirms that it has already commenced suo moto investigations into the privacy concerns raised in relation to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and the processing of personally identifiable information for the training of Meta AI. The outcome and further developments will be communicated once the investigations are concluded."<ad-spot></ad-spot>Kenya now joins the United Kingdom ( where the Information Commissioner's Office described the reports as "concerning" and demanded information from Meta ) and the United States, where lawsuits have been filed over biometric privacy violations. A Kenyan regulator opening a formal investigation into a global technology giant over AI training practices is not a routine event. It is a signal that the Data Protection Act 2019 has operational teeth, and that Kenya intends to use them.We wrote about this story on March 4. We called for this investigation. It has now begun.<h2>The Timeline That Got Us Here</h2>February 27 — Swedish newspapers Göteborgs-Posten and Svenska Dagbladet publish a joint investigation confirming that footage from Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses ( including bathroom visits, people undressing, bank card details, and intimate encounters ) was being routed to workers at Sama's Nairobi offices for AI training data annotation. Workers were paid approximately $2 per hour, required to sign NDAs, and told that raising concerns about the content risked termination.March 4 — TechInKenya publishes "<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.techinkenya.com/articles/nairobi-is-watching-your-bedroom-and-meta-knew">Nairobi Is Watching Your Bedroom. And Meta Knew</a>." — profiling the Sama operation, its documented history of exposing Kenyan workers to harmful content for OpenAI in 2023, and making the explicit case that the ODPC has jurisdiction over this processing and the authority to investigate.<ad-spot></ad-spot>March 6 — The Oversight Lab, a Kenyan digital rights organisation led by Executive Director Mercy Mutemi, files a formal petition with the ODPC requesting an investigation. The petition cites Sections 8 and 9 of the Data Protection Act. It asks the ODPC to determine whether individuals recorded by the glasses consented to their data being used to train Meta AI, whether cross-border data transfers complied with the Act, and whether Meta, Sama, or associated entities conducted a data protection impact assessment before handling the material. The petition requests completion within 90 days.March 6 onwards — Over 150 organisations and individuals sign letters of support urging the ODPC to conduct the investigation openly, transparently, and with public stakeholder participation.March 31 — The ODPC formally confirms it has commenced investigations, placing Kenya alongside the UK and US in active regulatory scrutiny of Meta over this specific issue.<h2>What the Investigation Covers</h2>The ODPC's investigation has two distinct threads, and it is worth being precise about each.The data subjects thread — individuals worldwide whose footage was captured by Ray-Ban smart glasses and processed by Kenyan workers at Sama. These are people in Sweden, Germany, France, the US, and elsewhere who were recorded by wearers of the glasses ( sometimes unknowingly, sometimes in deeply private moments ) and whose footage subsequently arrived in Nairobi for annotation. The data protection question for this thread is: was there a lawful basis for transferring that footage to Kenya for processing? Did Meta conduct the required data protection impact assessment? Were affected individuals informed that their data would be processed in Kenya?<ad-spot></ad-spot>The Kenyan workers thread — the Sama annotators who were required to view and label intimate footage as a condition of employment. Their data rights, their labour rights, and the psychological harm they suffered intersect with the Data Protection Act in ways that Kenya's regulators have not previously been asked to adjudicate at this scale.The Oversight Lab's petition covers both threads. The ODPC's confirmation letter references the processing of personally identifiable information in connection with Meta AI training which encompasses the first thread directly and implies examination of Sama's data handling practices, which touches the second.<h2>The Pattern That Makes This Investigation Necessary</h2>The details of the Sama operation were not new to anyone who had followed Kenyan tech labour reporting closely. This is the same company, in the same Nairobi offices, that TIME Magazine exposed in 2023 for paying workers $1.32 to $2 per hour to label child sexual abuse material, beheadings, and suicide footage for OpenAI. Workers from that operation described developing PTSD. Sama ended that contract after public pressure then pivoted to computer vision annotation for Meta's Ray-Ban programme.Mercy Mutemi's framing in the Oversight Lab petition draws the explicit parallel: "Just as we saw in the Worldcoin case, Kenya is once again being used as a training ground for exploitative and harmful AI." The Worldcoin biometric data collection scandal ( where Kenyan participants were paid small amounts to have their irises scanned for a cryptocurrency project ) resulted in the ODPC suspending Worldcoin's operations in Kenya and remains one of the clearest examples of the regulator acting assertively against a global tech platform.<ad-spot></ad-spot>The Ray-Ban glasses investigation presents a harder regulatory challenge than Worldcoin for one important reason: the data processing is not happening to Kenyans as subjects. It is happening by Kenyans as workers, processing data about people in other countries. The legal framework for that scenario under the Data Protection Act has not been fully tested.<h2>What the ODPC Can Actually Do</h2>The Data Protection Act 2019 gives the ODPC meaningful powers, but their application in a case of this complexity requires careful reading.Investigation powers — the ODPC can require Meta, Sama, and associated entities to provide information, documentation, and access to their data processing systems. This includes demanding evidence of the legal basis for processing, records of data protection impact assessments, and documentation of consent mechanisms.Enforcement powers — if the investigation finds violations, the ODPC can issue enforcement notices requiring specific remedial actions, impose administrative fines, and in serious cases refer matters to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The maximum fine under the Act is Ksh 5 million or 1% of annual gross turnover, figures that will not frighten Meta but that establish precedent and signal regulatory intent.The cross-border limitation— the ODPC's jurisdiction covers data processing operations conducted in Kenya. Sama's annotation work happens in Kenya. Meta's collection of footage from wearers in Europe and the US is outside Kenya's jurisdiction directly, but the transfer of that footage to Kenya for processing is squarely within it. The legal question is whether the Act's requirements for lawful cross-border data transfers were met, specifically whether the transfer was authorised under Section 48, which requires either the data subject's consent, contractual necessity, or adequacy determinations.<h2>What Comes Next</h2>The Oversight Lab has requested the investigation be completed within 90 days, which would put a conclusion around late June 2026. The ODPC's confirmation letter does not commit to a timeline, saying only that findings will be communicated upon conclusion.The investigation's credibility will depend on three things. First, whether the ODPC actually engages Meta and Sama directly demanding documentation, responses, and evidence rather than conducting a paper review. Second, whether civil society and affected stakeholders are given the opportunity to participate that Mercy Mutemi explicitly requested. Third, whether the findings, when they arrive, result in concrete enforcement action or recommendations rather than a report that is noted and filed.<ad-spot></ad-spot>Kenya has an opportunity here that goes beyond the specific facts of this case. The Worldcoin precedent demonstrated that the ODPC can act against a global platform with real consequences. A robust investigation into Meta's Ray-Ban data pipeline (one that examines the legal basis for data transfer, the adequacy of Sama's data handling, and the rights of both recorded subjects and annotating workers ) would establish Kenya as a serious data protection jurisdiction in the global conversation.That conversation is happening at the UK ICO, at Ireland's Data Protection Commission, and in US courts simultaneously. Kenya should be in that conversation as a regulator with standing and teeth, not as a footnote in someone else's investigation.The ODPC has taken the first step. What it does with the investigation it has opened will determine whether that step matters.This is a follow-up to our March 4 investigation "Nairobi Is Watching Your Bedroom. And Meta Knew." Read the full original piece <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.techinkenya.com/articles/nairobi-is-watching-your-bedroom-and-meta-knew">here</a>.

Kenya's Data Regulator Has Officially Opened an Investigation Into Meta's Ray-Ban Glasses. Here Is What Happens Next.

The global tech press is framing this story as a privacy scandal for Meta Ray-Ban wearers in Europe and America. They are not wrong. But they are missing the other half of the story, the half that happens in Nairobi.A joint investigation published February 27 by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.gp.se/nyheter/sverige/granskning-smarta-glasogon-delar-privat-innehall.0d4ff7f8-5ba3-5813-8806-e0c5c5ec14cc">Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten </a>has confirmed what should alarm anyone building Kenya's AI economy: a Nairobi-based company called Sama is routing intimate footage from millions of Western homes through its offices, paying Kenyan workers approximately $2 per hour to watch and label it, under NDAs, under office surveillance cameras, with an explicit policy that if you raise concerns about what you are seeing, you lose your job.This is not a technology problem. It is a labour problem, a data ethics problem, and, critically for Kenya, a regulatory problem that the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner has jurisdiction over right now.<h2>What Is Actually Happening</h2>Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, developed in partnership with EssilorLuxottica and priced from $299, have sold over seven million pairs. When a wearer says "Hey Meta" and asks the AI to analyse their surroundings, that footage does not stay on the device. It is uploaded to Meta's servers, where it enters a training pipeline that routes it to human data annotators at Sama's Nairobi offices.Those workers ( mostly college students and young graduates) are tasked with labelling objects in video clips so Meta's AI can learn to recognise the world more accurately. Draw a box around the chair. Identify the room type. Categorise the activity. Standard computer vision annotation work. Except the footage is not standard.<ad-spot></ad-spot>Workers told the Swedish journalists they regularly encounter footage of people using bathrooms, changing clothes, watching pornography, and having sex. Not because wearers were deliberately recording these moments, in many cases, the glasses were simply running, or left on a surface pointed at a room the wearer had forgotten was being captured."In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed," one Sama worker told the newspapers. "I don't think they know, because if they knew they wouldn't be recording."Another contractor described reviewing footage where the wearer set the glasses on a bedside table and left the room, only for their wife to walk in and undress, unaware she was being watched.Other footage included bank card details captured accidentally in frame, users watching pornography with the glasses on, and recordings described simply as "sex scenes." Workers said they felt compelled to annotate regardless of the content, stopping or raising concerns meant risking termination.Meta's face anonymisation system is supposed to protect identities in the footage. Workers say the automatic face anonymisation does not always work, faces that should be obscured are sometimes fully visible, particularly in difficult lighting conditions.<h2>Sama's Track Record in Nairobi</h2>Sama is not a new name in this conversation. It is the same company, in the same Nairobi offices, that <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/">TIME Magazine exposed in 2023 for paying Kenyan workers $1.32 to $2 per hour to label graphic content for OpenAI </a>(child sexual abuse material, beheadings, suicide footage ) while being billed to OpenAI at $12.50 per worker per hour. Workers described that experience as psychological torture. Several developed PTSD. Sama ended that contract after the TIME investigation and the resulting public pressure.It then pivoted to computer vision annotation, the work it now does for Meta's Ray-Ban glasses. Same workforce. Same pay structure. Same NDAs. Different content.After further reports exposed worker trauma and alleged union-busting at Sama's Nairobi office, the company ended its content moderation work for Meta in 2023 and shifted its focus to computer vision data annotation, the exact type of work now tied to the AI glasses.<ad-spot></ad-spot>The pattern is not coincidental. Sama's business model depends on a Nairobi labour market where $2 per hour is above minimum wage, where young graduates with limited formal sector options are willing to accept difficult conditions for stable income, and where NDA enforcement and office surveillance make collective action difficult.This is not unique to Sama. As Agence France-Presse documented last year, the global AI training industry routes its most sensitive, psychologically taxing, and legally ambiguous work to workers in Kenya, Colombia, India, and the Philippines — <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.straitstimes.com/world/gruelling-low-paid-human-work-behind-generative-ai-curtain">markets where labour costs are low</a>, regulatory oversight of outsourced data work is limited, and workers have limited recourse when the content damages them.But Sama is headquartered in Nairobi. It employs Kenyan workers. The data processing happens on Kenyan soil. That matters legally.<h2>The Regulatory Question Nobody Is Asking</h2>European privacy regulators are already moving. Petra Wierup, a lawyer at the Swedish data protection authority IMY, made clear that if Meta is the data controller under GDPR, protections must extend to subcontractors in third countries and cannot be weakened. NOYB, the Vienna-based privacy organisation that has filed multiple lawsuits against Meta, has flagged clear transparency failures and is examining legal grounds for action.The question that is not being asked loudly enough in Kenya: what is the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner going to do about this?<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.odpc.go.ke/data-protection-laws-kenya/">The Data Protection Act 2019 </a>applies to data processing operations conducted in Kenya. Sama processing footage in Nairobi ( including footage of identifiable individuals who have not consented to Kenyan data handling) falls squarely within the ODPC's jurisdiction. The Act requires data processors to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal data. Footage of people undressing, footage of people in bathrooms, footage of bank card details — all of it constitutes sensitive personal data under the Act's definitions.<ad-spot></ad-spot>The ODPC has the authority to investigate Sama's data handling practices, audit whether the processing meets the Act's standards, and impose penalties for non-compliance. It has the authority to require Meta to demonstrate the legal basis under which it transfers personal data to a Kenyan subcontractor. It has the authority to require Sama to disclose what data it holds, for how long, and what security measures protect it.Whether it exercises that authority is a different question. The ODPC is a young institution with limited resources and a mandate that has historically been stretched across complaints from individual Kenyans rather than investigations into multinational data pipelines. An investigation into Sama's Meta contract would be the most consequential enforcement action the ODPC has ever undertaken.It would also be entirely justified.<h2>What This Means for the Workers</h2>The international coverage has focused primarily on the privacy of the Ray-Ban wearers and the people accidentally captured in footage. That coverage is correct and important. But the workers in Sama's Nairobi offices are also victims of this pipeline, and they are getting less attention.These workers did not sign up to watch intimate footage of strangers from Western homes. They signed up for data annotation work, a job category that Kenya's government and tech industry have positioned as a formal sector opportunity for young graduates in the digital economy. The Kenya Vision 2030 framework and subsequent digital economy strategies have explicitly cited AI data labelling as a growth sector for employment.What Sama's model demonstrates is that "digital economy jobs" is not a self-evidently positive category. The digital economy can generate formal employment. It can also generate exploitative employment in professional-looking offices, with NDAs that prevent workers from speaking about what they experience, at pay rates that make the label "formal sector" technically accurate but economically misleading.The psychological toll of sustained exposure to intimate and disturbing footage ( documented in the OpenAI contract, documented again now ) is a worker welfare issue that Kenya's Ministry of Labour has not engaged with publicly. The Kenya ICT Board, which promotes Kenya as a BPO and data services destination, has been silent on the Sama revelations.Someone in government needs to ask: what are the conditions under which this work is being conducted, and do they meet Kenya's own standards?<h2>The Technology Defence That Does Not Hold</h2>Meta's official position is that its terms of service permit human review of AI interactions, that face anonymisation protects individuals in the footage, and that privacy controls give users meaningful choices about what is shared.Each of these claims deserves scrutiny.The terms of service defence is technically accurate and practically meaningless. Buried in a document that Ray-Ban users click through during setup is one sentence reserving the right to conduct "manual human review" of AI interactions. No reasonable person buying a pair of glasses marketed with the phrase "designed with your privacy in mind" reads that sentence and understands it to mean that strangers in Nairobi will watch footage from their bedroom.The face anonymisation claim has been directly contradicted by workers and by a former Meta employee. The system fails in difficult lighting — exactly the conditions common in homes, bedrooms, and bathrooms where the most sensitive footage originates.The privacy controls argument, that users can choose not to use the AI features, is accurate but deflects from the core problem. The LED indicator light intended to signal recording is, by multiple accounts, too small and dim for bystanders to reliably notice. The people accidentally captured in footage (the wife who walked into the bedroom, the person in the bathroom) have no controls. They are not Ray-Ban users. They never agreed to any terms of service. Their data is in Meta's training pipeline anyway.<ad-spot></ad-spot><h2>What Needs to Happen</h2>For Meta, the minimum response is meaningful: stop routing sensitive footage to human annotators without explicit, informed consent from all people identifiable in that footage. Fix the anonymisation system so it works in real-world lighting conditions, not just controlled tests. Publish a clear, plain-language explanation of what footage is reviewed by humans, by whom, in which countries, and under what data protection standards.For Sama, the questions are about labour standards: what psychological support is available to workers who encounter distressing content? What is the actual pay rate inclusive of all deductions? What does the NDA permit workers to disclose about their working conditions, and is that NDA itself compliant with Kenyan labour law?For the ODPC, the question is whether it will act. The Swedish investigation has provided the factual basis for an inquiry. European regulators are already examining the cross-border data transfer implications. Kenya's own data protection commissioner has both the jurisdiction and the obligation to investigate data processing happening in Nairobi offices that does not appear to meet the standards the Data Protection Act 2019 requires.For Kenya's broader tech sector, this story is a prompt for a harder conversation. AI data labelling is real employment. It is also work that can cause real harm, to workers who see things they cannot unsee, and to the people whose most intimate moments become training data without their knowledge. Positioning Kenya as Africa's AI data hub without asking hard questions about the conditions of that work is a strategy that trades short-term employment numbers for long-term reputational and human cost.The LED light on a pair of glasses in a Stockholm apartment is not doing enough to protect privacy. And the data commissioner's office in Nairobi has not yet done enough to protect the workers, and the data subjects, whose interests it exists to serve.If you work or have worked in AI data annotation in Kenya and want to share your experience confidentially, reach us at hello@techinkenya.com. Your identity will be protected.

Nairobi Is Watching Your Bedroom. And Meta Knew.

For 18 years, paying with M-Pesa at a till or paybill meant handing over two things: your money and your phone number. The merchant received a confirmation SMS showing your full name and complete mobile number, automatically, with no option to withhold it. That data did not stay in the transaction, it went into WhatsApp marketing lists, spam databases, and in the worst cases, social engineering scripts used to defraud you later.The Central Bank of Kenya approved a fix for this on February 27. Safaricom will now mask customer phone numbers across M-Pesa peer-to-peer transfers, Lipa na M-Pesa Till payments, and Paybill transactions. Merchants will still receive payment notifications, but instead of seeing 0722 123 456 they will see 0722XXXXXX. Your first name stays visible. Your money arrives. Your full contact details do not.It is a good change. It is also long overdue, the Data Protection Act 2019 has been in force for six years, and M-Pesa has been non-compliant with its data minimisation principles for all of them. But the implementation raises practical questions that the announcement did not fully answer, particularly for the millions of small merchants and the developers building M-Pesa integrations who need to understand exactly what changes and what does not.<h2>What Is Actually Changing</h2>The masking works differently depending on what type of transaction you are making.Peer-to-peer transfers— sending money directly from your M-Pesa to another person's M-Pesa, will partially mask your number in the recipient's confirmation SMS. If the recipient wants to see your full number, they can request it, and you get to decide whether to consent or decline. This is a meaningful privacy control. Previously, anyone you sent money to automatically had your number. Now you have a choice.Lipa na M-Pesa Till and Paybill payments — the transactions most Kenyans make dozens of times a week at supermarkets, fuel stations, restaurants, and utility payments, will mask both your full name and phone number from the merchant's confirmation. The merchant sees that a payment arrived, the amount, and a partial number. That is enough to confirm the transaction. It is not enough to build a marketing database or hand off to a scammer.Pochi la Biashara already had this protection. Safaricom piloted number masking through Pochi ( its small trader-focused product ) years ago, which is why mama mboga transactions have felt slightly different from supermarket till payments for anyone who noticed. This approval brings the rest of M-Pesa's merchant ecosystem up to that standard.The CBK has also directed Safaricom to run extensive consumer education before the rollout goes live, monitor feedback, address complaints, and submit monthly reports to the regulator. A specific rollout date has not been publicly announced.<ad-spot></ad-spot><h2>Why This Took Six Years</h2>The Data Protection Act 2019 required data minimisation (collecting only what is strictly necessary) from the moment it came into force. A payment transaction strictly requires the amount, a timestamp, and a reference number. It does not require the payer's full name and mobile number. By that standard, M-Pesa has been operating outside the spirit of the Act since 2019.Part of the delay is structural. The Communications Authority, not the CBK, regulates the telecommunications side of M-Pesa. Safaricom had already developed the number masking feature for merchant transactions. They built it, tested it with Pochi la Biashara, and were ready to deploy. But the CA's regulatory framework had not been updated to permit it for general M-Pesa transactions, creating a gap between what Safaricom could technically do and what it was permitted to do.The CBK approval granted last month covers the payments side, P2P transfers and Lipa na M-Pesa transactions that flow through the National Payment System. The CA still needs to update its framework to permit full rollout across all M-Pesa use cases. This is why the announcement specifies CBK approval but does not confirm a full deployment date, the regulatory picture is not entirely complete.The broader context is also worth noting. In 2025, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations arrested six cybercrime suspects in Mombasa running a scamming operation that relied heavily on harvested M-Pesa phone numbers. The pipeline from till payment to fraud attempt is not theoretical. It has been documented, prosecuted, and is still active. This feature closes one of the most exploited data leakage points in Kenya's mobile money ecosystem.<h2>The "Nionyeshe" Dilemma: Proof vs. Privacy</h2>This is where the practical disruption lands. The familiar ritual ("nionyeshe confirmation") is facing a forced evolution, but not for the reasons many think.For 18 years, the informal verification standard for M-Pesa has been the customer’s phone. A customer pays at a till or Paybill, and the merchant asks to see the SMS. The problem isn't usually that the merchant needs to "verify the name"; the problem is that the merchant often doesn't have the phone that receives the payment notification. Whether it’s a mama mboga whose business phone is at home or a supermarket cashier waiting for a delayed system hit, the customer’s SMS is the only immediate proof of payment.The Privacy PenaltyWhile "nionyeshe" solves the merchant's verification gap, it creates a massive privacy hole for the customer. Showing a confirmation message almost always means exposing your M-Pesa balance. In a busy queue or at a high-traffic stall, this "proof of payment" forces Kenyans to reveal their financial standing to strangers just to complete a transaction.Why the System is StrainingWith the move toward number masking and stricter data privacy, the "nionyeshe" ritual becomes even more problematic:Masked Identity: Even if the merchant looks at your phone, if the data is masked, they lose the ability to cross-reference the sender with the person standing there, making the "proof" less reliable for them.Security Risks: Forcing customers to show their screens is a practice the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner is actively discouraging to prevent social engineering and data theft.What Merchants Must Do Differently<ad-spot></ad-spot>To move away from peering at customers' balances for proof, Safaricom and the ODPC are pushing for tools that put the "proof" back into the merchant's hands:<ul class="tight" data-tight="true"><li>M-Pesa Business App: Real-time push notifications for the person actually running the till. It’s the cleanest way to see a transaction without asking the customer for a thing.</li><li>The *334# USSD Fallback: For the "non-smartphone" duka owner, dialing the USSD code is the official way to check the latest transactions on the business side without needing the customer to reveal their screen.</li><li>Daraja API Integration: For larger retailers, the payment should hit the POS system instantly, removing the human element entirely.</li></ul><h2>The Question Nobody Has Answered: What Does the Developer API Return?</h2>When a customer makes an M-Pesa payment on a merchant's website or app using the Daraja STK Push API, Safaricom sends a callback to the merchant's server with the transaction details. That callback currently includes the customer's full phone number in the JSON payload , it is what merchants use to identify which customer made which payment and update their order or account records accordingly.The masking approved by the CBK applies to the confirmation SMS the customer receives and the notification the merchant sees on their business app. What has not been publicly confirmed is whether Safaricom will also mask the phone number in the Daraja API callback sent to merchant backends.If the answer is no ( if the full number still arrives in the callback even while being masked in the SMS ) then the privacy protection is partially cosmetic. Merchants integrating directly via the API, including any operator who builds their own payment system, would still receive and potentially store the full number server-side. The spam and fraud risk would not be eliminated, just shifted from the SMS layer to the database layer.If the answer is yes ( if Safaricom masks the number at the API level too ) then merchants will need to update how they identify returning customers and match payments to accounts, since the phone number has historically been the primary identifier in M-Pesa integrations.Safaricom has not addressed this publicly. Developers building on Daraja should watch the API changelog and the developer forum closely as the rollout approaches. This is the implementation detail that matters most for anyone running M-Pesa on the backend.<h2>What This Means for You as a Consumer</h2>If you use M-Pesa to pay at merchants (which covers virtually every adult Kenyan) the change is straightforwardly positive with one adjustment.You will stop receiving unsolicited marketing messages from merchants after transactions, at least from the merchants who were harvesting your number from M-Pesa confirmations directly. You will face less exposure to social engineering attacks that start with a scammer who knows your M-Pesa number from a transaction record. Your data will travel with your money only as far as it needs to, to confirm the payment, not further.For peer-to-peer transfers specifically, the consent model for full number sharing is a meaningful new control. You can send money to someone without automatically giving them your contact details. For people who use M-Pesa to pay individuals they do not know well ( splitting a bill with a new acquaintance, paying a freelancer for the first time) that control matters.<ad-spot></ad-spot><h2>The Bigger Picture</h2>Kenya's mobile money system has been a global benchmark for financial inclusion for nearly two decades. But the architecture that made M-Pesa remarkable in 2007 ( simple, transparent, identity-anchored) was designed before data privacy was a regulatory concern anywhere in the world, let alone in Kenya.Number masking is a small technical change. What it represents is larger: the beginning of a serious attempt to retrofit modern data protection principles onto infrastructure that was never built with them in mind. The Data Protection Act 2019 was the legal mandate. The ODPC has been gradually enforcing it. The CBK's approval is the payments regulator catching up with a standard that the law set six years ago.The next step, and one that consumer advocates and privacy researchers have flagged, is the CA updating its framework to permit full rollout and closing the gap that currently prevents Safaricom from deploying the merchant masking feature without regulatory ambiguity. Once that happens, M-Pesa will for the first time operate as a payment system where your identity travels only as far as the transaction requires. In a country where mobile money is effectively the financial nervous system, that is a more significant upgrade than it sounds.

Consumer rights

Kenya's Data Regulator Has Officially Opened an Investigation Into Meta's Ray-Ban Glasses. Here Is What Happens Next.

Nairobi Is Watching Your Bedroom. And Meta Knew.

M-Pesa Is Hiding Your Phone Number From Merchants. Here Is Everything That Changes, And What Nobody Has Answered Yet.

The Agentic AI Problem Nobody is Solving: Who Protects the Victims?

The Global Smartphone Inequality: Why Kenya Pays More for Less (And the Math That Proves It)