South Africa’s newly established Information Regulator (IR) will soon conduct a global benchmarking tour in an effort to ensure that it meets global standards ahead of the commencement of all parts of its enabling law, the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI), in March next year.
The IR was established in December 2016 to manage compliance with POPI.
While it is already taking complaints from the general public from temporary office space provided by the department of justice, the regulator aims to hire up to a hundred people when its full organisational structure is implemented.
Advocate Johannes Weapond, full-time member of IR said, “We will go to the UK and then to the rest of the Europe as part of the first phase where we will compare what we have to how they have been operating. The second phase will see us go to Ghana and see how they set up their regulator and what their regulator deals with. In Ghana, we are already aware, for example, that we call it personal information they call it data protection and that they don’t provide for access to information.”…
PRIVACY & SURVEILLANCE IN AFRICA 