The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects the personal data of natural persons and at the same time allows the free movement of such data within the European Union (EU). Hailed as majestic by admirers and dismissed as protectionist by critics, the Regulation is expected to have a profound impact around the world, including in the African Union (AU). For European–African consortia conducting research that may affect the privacy of African citizens, the question is ‘how to protect personal data of data subjects while at the same time ensuring a just distribution of the benefits of a global digital ecosystem?’ We use location privacy as a point of departure, because information about an individual’s location is different from other kinds of personally identifiable information. We analyse privacy at two levels, individual and cultural. Our perspective is interdisciplinary: we draw from computer science to describe three scenarios of transformation of volunteered or observed information to inferred information about a natural person and from cultural theory to distinguish four privacy cultures emerging within the EU in the wake of GDPR. We highlight recent data protection legislation in the AU and discuss factors that may accelerate or inhibit the alignment of data protection legislation in the AU with the GDPR.

The emblematic intergovernmental Group of Earth Observations (GEO) sees food, water and energy security, natural hazards, pandemics of infectious diseases, sustainability of key services, poverty, and climate change as societal challenges

In this Special Issue, we bring together contributions from authors in the scientific discipline Geo-Information Science who engaged with the question: How does Geo-Information Science contribute to the development of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators? The editorial to the Special Issue situates the individual contributions in a broader social science debate, which critically examines the quantification of global policy goals and its effects on how we know and govern the world. We put forward concepts of ‘measuring the world’ and a brief history of the Geo-Information Science discipline, including its dominant positivist paradigm as well as scholarly debates that reflected on and shifted that paradigm. Given the global policy focus of the SDGs, we also briefly discuss policy science paradigms. We analyze the individual articles with regard to their contribution to the SDG indicator development trajectory. We also show how alternative ways of knowing and governing the world complement the dominant positivist paradigm.

Development professionals have deployed several mobile phone-based ICT (Information and Communications Technology) platforms in the global South for improving water, health, and education services. In this paper, we focus on a mobile phone-based ICT platform for water services, called Sensors, Empowerment and Accountability in Tanzania (SEMA), developed by our team in the context of an action research project in Tanzania. Water users in villages and district water engineers in local governments may use it to monitor the functionality status of rural water points in the country. We describe the current architecture of the platform’s front-end (the SEMA app) and back-end and elaborate on its deployment in four districts in Tanzania. To conceptualize the evolution of the SEMA app, we use three concepts: transaction-intensiveness, discretion and crowdsourcing. The SEMA app effectively digitized only transaction-intensive tasks in the information flow between water users in villages and district water engineers. Further, it resolved two tensions over time: the tension over what to report (by decreasing the discretion of reporters) and over who should report (by constraining the reporting “crowd”).

Tanzania’s urban citizens are still insufficiently supplied with safe drinking water by their water utilities. However, instead of collectively clamouring for improvements, citizens channel their protests individually to water authorities. This paper aims to shed light on citizens’ protest strategies and the responses they elicit from the water authorities. It draws on extensive fieldwork carried out in a Tanzanian town, which revealed four protest strategies employed by citizens: “stay and speak up”, “speak up and leave”, “resignation” and “leave and remain silent.” The study reveals a substantial mismatch between citizens’ protest strategies and the formal/informal complaint mechanisms of the water authority. This has negative implications for underprivileged citizens and for broadly defined “access to water”.

The Water Sector Development Programme (WSDP) of Tanzania aims to improve the performance of the water sector in general and rural water supply (RWS) in particular. During the first phase of the WSDP (2007 to 2014), implementing agencies developed information systems for attaining management efficiencies. One of these systems, the Water Point Mapping System (WPMS), has now been completed, and the database is openly available to the public, as part of the country’s commitment to the Open Government Partnership (OGP) initiative. The Tanzanian WPMS project was the first attempt to map “wall-to-wall” all rural public water points in an African nation. The complexity of the endeavor led to suboptimal results in the quality of the WPMS database, the baseline of the WPMS. The WPMS database was a means for the future monitoring of all rural water points, but its construction has become an end in itself. We trace the challenges of water point mapping in Tanzania and describe how the WPMS database was initially populated and to what effect. The paper conceptualizes errors found in the WPMS database as material, observational, conceptual and discursive, and characterizes them in terms of type, suspected origin and mitigation options. The discussion focuses on the consequences of open data scrutiny for the integrity of the WPMS database and the implications for monitoring wicked water point data.