Accra, October 20, 2017//-Congrats to Vokacom Group, the Ghanaian Company that won the contract for the national digital address system.
Their framework is not only innovative but commendable. There are however, a few anomalies that I discovered, some of which, shouldn’t be taken lightly.
- The Sign Up page, which requires an individual to enter their first and last names, doesn’t have its fields validated. For testing purposes, I used digits as my name and the app proceeded to register me without any warning whatsoever. This renders the database redundant of authentic data. Surely, an app that has the backing of the government should by no means have this simple flaw.
- As of today, 19/10/2017 6:00pm, the Server that hosts the app after I traced it pointed to Amazon Web Services (Cloud). I find it dubious when “they” try to hide such information with a tenuous reason revolving around security. Is the location of the Server important? Yes it does. The Data Protection Act (2012) passed by Parliament and assented to by the President of Ghana only yields it power within the confines of Ghana.
The information about Ghanaians contained in the App and hosted on Amazon Servers isn’t subject to scrutiny per our Data Protection Act. Although the company behind the data collection is located in Ghana, it’s Contractual Agreement to protect the data is with a foreign company somewhere in Seattle, USA.
- The intent of the App (to give digital addresses to properties) may have been slightly exaggerated. Let’s think of it more as a digital location identifier. The unique code (the last 4 digits) that describes your exact location can change within a radius from 3 meters and beyond. Hence, the same apartment, house or other property can generate several unique codes. If these codes are to be used in transactions (say opening a bank account or some form of business registration), then the system may not be able to reconcile a code with another that represents different location of the same house/property.
- The first letter of the code generated as your location represents the Region in which one is located.
If Greater Accra is represented by G, and Ashanti Region by A, what then becomes the identifier for Upper East and Upper West?
- The app heavily relies on Google Maps for navigation. As a matter of fact the data packets from and to the app are predominantly channelled through Amazon and Google Servers. Hence, whatever limitation Google Maps has due to our inefficient Street addressing won’t be rectified by GhanaPostGPS. The algorithm will generate the code of your exact location alright, however, navigating to that location is dependent on whether or not Google Maps recognizes that location.
I love the feature that allows anyone to report incidents to the Police or Fire Service without having to describe their location. That’s highly commendable. You can also share your location with friends on Whatsapp or other mediums. However, that location can only be seen if that person also has the App installed on their phone.
By Nana Poku Afriyie-Asante
