Why expiring data also belongs in the scrap heap

Back in the 1990s, then-Pension Funds Adjudicator Vuyani Ngalwana shook up the life and investment sector when he ended the practice of front-loading fees at the start of an investment policy and of punitive cancellation costs that could often suck up the biggest chunk of an investment if a client could not afford to continue paying. Until then, the industry made a fortune out of these unjust fees, often levied on the working and lower-middle-class, who are the most vulnerable of investors and who need the flexibility to cater for changing life circumstances. In a Fin24 analysis, Ferial Haffajee notes that Ngalwana deserves a national order for this. She notes that today’s version of that ‘lousy’ business practice is expiring data. ‘It is the biggest ruse and we suffer its consequences all the time. Milk can expire. Fruit can expire. Meat can expire. Kleptocratic presidents can expire – thank God. But data cannot expire. Yet, South Africans' data expires at significant volumes – it’s a folly that consumers must make extinct in 2019 in the same way that Ngalwana killed punitive policy cancellation and premium reduction costs in the Nineties. The telecommunications companies (telcos) are making a killing out of so-called expired data which they write up as unearned annual profits. It’s price-gouging, and so lucrative that both MTN and Vodacom took the Icasa to court when it tried to make data portable and so stop its expiration.’ Haffajee has been trying to track her data to better understand how it works. ‘Unless you have hours to sit on your phone and to understand the labyrinthine systems, packages, offers and expiry times, it’s a fool's game. You are going to lose some of it. Add to this practice the cost of data in SA (which is among the highest in the world and also among countries of a similar size). It’s clear that while the giant mobile communication companies are fabulous innovators and examples of pride to the South African corporate sector, their business practices are not competitive nor are they making data the economic liberator it is and should be.’