Potential Privacy Violation on Manual Contact Tracing: A Rwanda Case Study

A vast amount of personal information is available on the internet, making it easy to extract a significant amount of information from a single piece of data. This study examines the potential risk of privacy violations in the manual collection of personal data during the COVID-19 pandemic in Rwanda. The research involved eight security firms to assess their data collection and disposal practices. The findings reveal a potential danger of privacy breaches due to employee ignorance and the lack of an internal policy on data handling. Moreover, storing personal data on cloud platforms not hosted in Rwanda violates Rwandan Data Protection Law. The study recommends large-scale research and government support to improve data protection practices, providing employee training, developing internal policies, securing data storage, regular data disposal, and promoting citizen awareness of data protection laws and privacy violations.