Catholic Priest Expresses Dismay Over ECSL Data Exhibition
By Mohamed Konneh
The Executive Director of Caritas Freetown, Rev. Fr. Peter Konteh has expresses dismay over the data exhibition by the Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone noting that the personal data should be private.
Fr, Konteh noted that personal data normally refers to as data that can identify a person.
‘There is a balance to be made between what you want to do with people’s personal data, the benefits that brings to them or to society as a whole, and any harm that might be caused as a result.
The terms data protection and data privacy are often used interchangeably, but there is an important difference between the two, he said.’
He said data privacy defines who has access to data, while data protection provides tools and policies to actually restrict access to the data and that compliance regulations help ensure that user’s privacy requests are carried out by companies, and companies are responsible to take measures to protect private user data.
The Catholic Priest noted that if they should protect the rights of citizens to their safety and security they would have not exposed us all like this.
He said ECSL should have used another strategy getting queues for each person to verify without accessing each other's data. The ECSL data exhibition is geared towards displaying provisional voter list starting from November 28th to December 5th 2022.
The purpose is for registrants who took part in the registration process to confirm their information, correct errors if any or be opportune to have their omitted names included or object to certain names on the PVL on ground of ineligibility. The exhibition exercise is been conducted in all 446 Wards having 3,630 centres and will have an exhibition officer and two assistants
Fr. Peter Leo Konteh is now challenging this singular activity noting that the ECSL is exposing people’s personal data.
‘Our names, Phones numbers and address are been displayed in public and this is bad. They could have used another method but the open display of personal data is incorrect, he said.’
Fr. Conteh noted that Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone is violating the citizens’ data Privacy by posting publicly very Personal data for the purpose of verification.
‘This is big Security risk to individuals- if personal data falls into the wrong hands, people could be harmed. Depending on the situation, they could become victims of identity theft, discrimination or even physical harm, he concluded.’
