Found in the heart of Africa, Uganda is a country that has had its fair share of hardships over the years. The nation has been marred by poverty and military coups, with a huge gap between the large rural areas and the smaller but modernized cities. This kind of divide is illustrated by the internet access as well, since citizens and tourists can only find reliable internet in the capital or other major metropolitan areas. Uganda is also seen as a partly free country by privacy advocate sites such as Freedom House, because while on one hand several pro-privacy bills have been passed by legislators, at the same time the government hopes to pay back its national debts by imposing a social media tax on its citizens.
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Internet access is rapidly increasing in Uganda, steadily catching up to other African countries. At the end of 2017, internet penetration had reached 21.9%, which is quite an achievement considering that in 2008 only 2.5 million people subscribed to broadband internet in a country with an populace of 41.5 million. There are over a dozen internet providers in Uganda – Roke Telkom, Smile Communication, Datanet, and Africa Online to name just a few – and most of them offer high speed connections in the capital and neighboring cities, though connectivity drops significantly in poor, rural regions. The average speed ranges between 0.5Mbit and 5Mbit.
In terms of online privacy Uganda still has a long way to go to catch up, but the country is generally on the right track. The 1995 constitutional law explicitly protects an individual’s right to privacy, but it’s meant to cover privacy in general and doesn’t particularly mention any online rights. For quite some time the country has failed to address data protection, too; during the early 2010s, legislators started to recognize the importance of online privacy and come up with certain bills – such as the Computer Misuse Act or the Electronic Signature Act – to prohibit unauthorized access to data and the protecting the disclosure of it. Unfortunately, most of these vaguely worded and failed to adequately solve the issue.
Hopefully the Data Protection and Privacy Bill will bring much-needed clarification and become the first step towards safe internet use for Ugandan internet users. This bill was originally published in 2014, but has gone through several redrafts because it contained unclear definitions. Still, privacy advocates welcomed the positive direction this legislation is taking.
In September 2009 the OpenNet Initiative investigated Uganda’s internet policy and it discovered that no traces of data filtering or governmental surveillance took place, though at the time a very low percent of the population could afford to have access to the web. As technology has advanced and people engaged in freely expressing their thoughts, Ugandan officials felt the need to step in. 2018 marked the arrival of two major injunctions aimed at curbing people’s internet use.
The first is a social media tax. For the ‘privilege’ of using services such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, netizens must pay 200 Ugandan shillings (around 5 U.S. cents) through their ISP’s online interface per day. Paying extra for social media access might be outrageous in itself but considering the low salary of the average Ugandan, this law is clearly meant to discourage people from openly sharing their opinions. The second directive is a outright censorship in which the Pornographic Control Committee forced ISPs to block access to 27 sites for streaming adult content.
Even though the affected sites are just a fragment of online platforms streaming pornographic videos, the move clearly indicates the Ugandan government’s willingness for censorship. The public outcry has been palpable ever since the regulations leaked and experts fear that the government’s action will decrease interest in the internet, ultimately further delaying the country’s technological growth.
Following the introduction of these unpopular directives, VPN use has soared in Uganda. For bloggers, journalists, and civil rights activists the monthly fee of a virtual private network is still more affordable than paying the daily social media ransom, since masking their IP not only prevents ISPs from tracking them but also unblocks foreign and local websites. The rising popularity of VPNs hasn’t gone unnoticed by the government, however. Mutabazi, Executive President of the Uganda Communication Commission, posted the following message on Facebook: “If you think it is cheaper to use VPN than paying Shs 200/day, I think it is very unwise”. He also added that authorities have the means to battle it: “We have technology that will block the VPN services so that no one dodges the taxes”.
It’s unknown how much credence is behind this threat since muzzling VPN use altogether requires either strong internet filtering technology or pressure on ISPs to censor people’s access to foreign websites that are advertising such a service. If Uganda decides to go down this road, it would further erode people’s right to privacy.
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