Tuesday 30 July 2024

Law Society of Namibia - Demand to desist from "unlawful acquisition and dissemination of private and confidential information"

For the regular readers of my blog you will recall my post Law Society of Namibia leaks members details - June 2023.  

The Law Society of Namibia sent me a letter of demand to desist from unlawful acquisition and dissemination of private and confidential information of or relating to members of the Law Society of Namibia.

First let us look at the events that brought about this demand:

Chronological Sequence of Events

12 July 2023 -  Email - LOUW to LSN 
As I explained over the telephone, your website page https://lawsocietynamibia.org/find-a-firm-or-practitioner/ is leaking data of your members such as full names, date of birth, date registered and personal cellular numbers (To view in Chrome press “CTRL + U) and each for “Ezer” as an example to see all the information of Judge Hosea Angula. 
I hope you will be able to correct this unintentional leak and prevent other user with less than savoury motives from copying this data.

As part of my information sharing to clients, I would like an opportunity yo make a presentation to your organisation regarding Legislation for informational privacy in Namibia as well as opportunities for the legal profession in the usage of verifiable consumer data. You can contact me directly on 081 688 1368 or my email address to arrange such an appointment. (My consultation to organisations are free ;-)

20 July 2023 -  Meeting with management of LSN

25 July 2023 -  Email - LOUW to LSN
Thank you for the opportunity to meet with you and your team last week to discuss: 
  • Accidental leaking of members personal details; LSN Communication processes and my possible contribution; 
  • NamBiz Consumer database and its possible uses by LSN and its members; and 
  • Lastly, the complaint process and how, as the Namibia Consumer Protection Group (NSPG), I can work together with LSN.
  • The inadvertent leak of email addresses, cellular numbers and date of birth through the website have been fixed with the permanent removal of this page from the LSN website. This data will still be searchable using Google but very users are sophisticated enough to do this. It was already only tech savvy users that could have seen the list previously, and even then it was difficult.

27 July 2023 -  Email - LSN to LOUW
Thank you for your email. All your emails and information shared with us will be provided to the Council of the Law Society for its consideration and we will thereafter revert back with the resolution from the Council.


1 September 2023 - Newsletter to 35,000 emails - "Leaked data of LSoN"

15 April 2024 -  Personalised SMS and email to persons whose information has been leaked(NSFAF, LSoN, Social Security Commission)


29 July 2024 -  Letter of Demand from LSoN

My reply:


I hereby acknowledge receipt of your letter of demand and reject any of your assertions as the information you made publicly available was already gleaned from public facing databases as was explained in my meeting with your good offices. In fact, as I was able to show your colleagues, some of the information on your website was in fact incorrect (date of birth, etc.). 

Thus your assertion in point No. 6 has no validity "you have unlawfully acquired private and confidential information of members of the Law Society from the website of the Law Society and it is this information that you are unlawfully circulating and transmitting as aforesaid."

Please further allow me to once again give a short overview of the NamBiz Consumer Database and its usage. The Dbase started in 2004 and since then has been updated with public facing data such as land, marriage, death and voters register. In addition, personal information on the Internet has also been cross-referenced such as social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, etc.).

The NamBiz Dbase consists of:
* Total Records: 3,005,106
* ID Numbers: 1,850,984
* Old SWA ID: 350,808 (Historical)
* Cultural Groups: 420,300 
* Cellular Numbers: 1,526,949
* Postal Address: 844,342
* Facebook address: 409,423
* WhatsApp: ± 290,000

As for geographical areas, our data records per region are:

* Erongo - 13,2504
* Hardap - 54,436
* Karas - 14,204
* Kavango East - 87,581
* Kavango West - 57,186
* Khomas - 297,903
* Kunene - 59,821
* Ohangwena - 168,470
* Omaheke - 51,314
* Omusati - 166,986
* Oshana - 136,056
* Oshikoto - 128,155
* Otjozondjupa - 105,544
* Zambezi - 51,040 records
Please note that these are the total numbers of records, and include deceased persons and duplicate records showing differing addresses, etc for time/change analysis and tracing.

I therefore reject your demands with the contempt it deserves. I only informed your organisation of the faults you have made on your website to prevent any misuse by any other parties.

I once again categorically state that I do not import information from any source that cannot prove its legal or regulatory function and the reason it is made public.

Lastly, I stand ready for any litigation undertaken by any person or body that has given out information via the World Wide Web and now claims it is “unlawfully acquired” as perhaps this will bring this issue to the fore in our country that has no legal framework for the ways in which data can be used once provided by the “now” aggrieved parties.

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