In the defense of my good friend Thuo;

1. The kind of entities that would (allegedly so far) compel Safaricom (SC) to mine your data has access to all the below mentioned.

1. National ID card details
2. High school results slip, and university transcripts
3. Payslip
4. Bank statement
5. Health status, and medical records
6. Name of past and current girl friends, wife, and kids (Unless you have never texted or called them)
7. The name of your kids, age, where they go to school, and class

2. I think we also need to give some benefit of doubt that SC is simply running an optimizer that could essentially be doing some transparent caching. Whenever the actual truth will be confirmed, I will perhaps join the protest by making some serious noises with my keyboard.

3. We could also blowing this out of proportion. How much sensitive data do we transmit over the basic HTTP protocol nowadays? And if you are telling me that KE has NSA and GCHQ grade HTTPS popping capabilities, then first of all I am impressed..

The issue for me would be more towards the protection of this data by requiring court orders (even if in secret but recorded requests eg. between AG -> CJ) for a particular person's data to be accessed from the archives or in real-time.

For my part, a concern that I have had with SC has to do with the permissions they request for on their Apps. I could be very wrong here, but I believe that these Apps only need Internet access so that they can pull your data from SC servers. These permissions could potentially grant a malicious attacker access to a lot of information if SC's systems were to be compromised.

I request Steve to clarify these in detail so that I may be able to have the peace of mind of installing and using their very useful (really) features, and remove my bad rating for mledger :)

Below are the current permission requests.

mLedger:-

Version 5.0 can access:

Identity

find accounts on the device

Contacts

find accounts on the device
read your contacts

SMS

read your text messages (SMS or MMS)
edit your text messages (SMS or MMS)

Phone

directly call phone numbers
read phone status and identity

Photos/Media/Files

read the contents of your USB storage
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Storage

read the contents of your USB storage
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Device ID & call information

read phone status and identity

Other

view network connections

create accounts and set passwords

full network access

run at startup

control vibration

prevent device from sleeping

set an alarm

install shortcuts

uninstall shortcuts

MySafaricom:-

Version 1.1.1.0 can access:

Device & app history

retrieve running apps