The Kenyan authorities have penalised an online lender $3,700 (£3,400) over allegations of intruding and sharing customers’ personal data.
It followed complaints lodged against it by users over personal data breaches.
The Office of Data Protection said it received close to 150 complaints against Whitepath Ltd, alleging the lender’s mobile app was mining phone contacts data to engage in debt-shaming practices.
The lender’s staff were also accused of harassing the complainants and their friends and relations through phone contacts obtained irregularly.
A company that sells office space, Regus Kenya, was also fined a similar amount after being accused of spamming complainants despite efforts to make them stop.
Kenya’s data commissioner, Immaculate Kassait, said that data protection was the responsibility of every data controller and processor.
A pastor complained that over a week-long period, his phone had been inundated by calls from debt collectors who claimed that one of his congregants had nominated him as the guarantor to a loan that she had taken.
At first the man of cloth thought it was a joke but after several annoying phone calls he moved from curiosity to bemusement and finally anger at how invasive this form of debt shaming was.
The intensity of the phone conversations changed from day to day.
Initially the callers were polite and simply asked him to speak to his congregant to pay back the money she had borrowed the month before.
But soon thereafter the callers became more aggressive and even crass, calling him a fake pastor who refused to speak truth to his congregation about the paying of debts and promising that they would make his phone “explode” with their incessant calls.
To add insult to injury they even abused his wife when she tried to intervene.
For several days the pastor could not use his phone because he refused to comply with the demands of the callers.
And after the story hit the airwaves and social media with the #Debtofshame hashtag many Kenyans started relaying their experiences when confronted by debt collectors.
One Twitter user said he was warned that “if I don’t pay, they will come for my kidney”.
Another said she once borrowed 2,000 Kenyan shillings ($18; £13), and 10 days later “they were on my neck. I couldn’t sleep nor think. I got all the insults one could think of”.
A third recalled that when he worked as a debt recovery agent, he had to meet daily targets set by his employer.
“The owners didn’t care about how you recovered the money. They are only interested in recovering their money. I had to quit for my sanity,” he said.
There is no doubt that Kenyans have embraced taking loans through digital-lending apps.
They are discreet, quick to access and require no collateral.
But therein lies the dilemma for the lenders who use the repayment habits of users to gauge their creditworthiness and they never physically meet their customers.
Indeed, none of this would have been possible if the African continent was not the global leader in mobile money.
Mobile network operators have dominated money services in Africa for the last decade.
More recently however the spotlight has fallen on the financial technology companies that have established a solid footing, some backed by huge venture capital groups in Western and Asia markets.