Connect with us

Uncategorized

TSA Controversy an Unnecessary Distraction – Obaro

Published

on

Kindly share this post

Mr. John Obaro, managing director, Systemspecs, the Information Technology firm that manages the Treasury Single Account (TSA) being implemented by the federal government of Nigeria.
Obaro was at Beacon of ICT Awards 2016 held recently where he won Software personality of the Year.
 He took time out to speak on the controversy surrounding the TSA with selected journalists, chike onwuegbuchi was there.

The Unspoken Truth on TSA
TSA started very quietly and crept into the nation and by the time people woke up to realise the impact, they found out that very surprising that such a thing could happened. Today the government is in a position to know the total cash position at any point in time.
There was a time government had over 17,000 accounts in different banks that nobody even knew about all of them, so you now have a platform that can bring all of them together for government to say this is our cash position at this point in time.
Two, you are in a position to track all the payments going out of government, who moves what payments and who are the beneficiaries. In addition, everybody making payments to government you have data on the minute of such payment, you are able to keep track of everything on this platform.
Also in addition to that, you have a situation in the past were people will pretend to have made payment to government, and probably forged some receipts and get away with it, now it is no longer possible as every payment is verified online before service is provided. So, in terms of impact, this is a system that has really fundamentally changed many things. Well off-course, you will appreciate that to come in with a system in an environment like this, you do not expect everybody to clap for you, so that is the situation where we are in.
In addition to that many people don’t really understand what TSA is about, they don’t understand what is happening but there are also those people who know what you are doing and are determined to frustrate this TSA by frustrating the technology behind it why pretending to be supporting the noble course of TSA.

Government’s Savings with TSA
As at December 2015, over two trillion naira (N2,000 000 000 000)had come into the coffers of government.
And like our dear president said sometimes ago, in previous years at the end of year, somehow all these monies disappeared in one way or the other that nobody was unable to give proper account of it.
But now government knows they have over two trillion naira (N2,000 000 000) where you can decide how you want to genuinely use the money.
Also, before now all these funds were in commercial banks, government would go to commercial banks borrow money at 15% because they do not really know that these funds were there.
They just go to borrow at commercial banks and end up paying 15%. But now you have these monies in government coffers and you can imagine the type of savings that you are making not only because you don’t pay this kind of interest charges but because you now even have funds you can actually invest.

 The Data Generated from TSA
When the TSA project was to start, nobody even understood the scope and nobody could give any form of statistics on the data that would come, saying how many Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), what type of transaction would come from MDAs?
This was a contentious issue that was debated severally but with TSA now there is a lot of data flowing into government which now move to the next face; economic planning.
And now that you have these data, you can now begin to do a lot of economic planning with these data but unfortunately, unavoidable controversies of the last few months have been unnecessary because it is time to get down to real business and begin to use these data proactively for planning purposes.

Hosting TSA Data Outside the Country
When you talk about data hosting we very much believe in Nigeria and that is something that drives Systemspecs and all those who know who Systemspecs, recognize that we believe in Nigeria.
However, you need to also plan things properly; otherwise you will ride on a motion and crash when the chips are down.
In the first place when we started the TSA project, we did not have data centres in Nigeria. Now, yes, we have data centres in Nigeria and we have a work plan with the CBN that by the end of 2016, this things would have been migrated locally. What we don’t want is a situation where we just move abruptly and then crash the main system.

Cost Effective Way to Transfer TSA Hosting Back to Nigeria
Part of the challenge we have even with the local hosting is reliability and security. Those two things are the main drivers for why organizations host abroad today. Now the infrastructures are being developed locally to be able to develop these two major areas of concerns.
The third area of concern is cost. Cost is still an issue. The figure you get from the Nigeria providers are much significantly higher than what you get abroad.
Having said that, I believe working with government as they are doing, we would get the support to be able to address these concerns significantly such that asking people to host locally will not just be an emotional argument or economic argument but a compelling need.

Challenges
As we speak for instance, you are aware of the controversies on the TSA project, very avoidable controversies over a one percent charge. When this one percent was discussed, nobody had an idea of the scope, no data was available, it was Remita that brought these data to the fore and were now able to see some huge sums and then there came the question that these figures are high. And then we said let’s renegotiate now that we have some data.
 Our first letter that we are open to renegotiation was dated September 16, 2015. Instead of focusing on renegotiating a lot of noise eventually came up that one percent is too high.
Meanwhile, incidentally I just came back for Glasglow where I was given an award by the Africa Scotland forum recognising the kind of thing we are doing in Nigeria. The interesting thing is that when I got to the airport, the cab that took me had a bold sign on it; “for this payment channels a convenient charge of 5% be added.”
So, 5% is not an unusual figure in this industry. Here we are talking of 1% and we say we are open to renegotiation and then a lot of avoidable controversies is being made out of that. I want to believe that there is a lot of mischievous going on and one would then expect someone in a position to close this matter and focus on the real issues of benefits from the platform.

Trust in the system
I need to be honest that we were taking by surprise.  This is because the worst that we thought would happened was that someone who wake up one day and say he does not want TSA but the beat about saying that there is fraud and abuse of the platform, that was a bit heavy and was sudden on us because for those who know Systemspecs one thing that drives us is our ethics.
The person you may call the doyen of ethics in Nigeria today Dr, Christopher Kolade is our chairman and has been our chairman for nine years.  Some years ago, he resigned from all the other companies that he is involved with and he remain only with Systemspec, which should tell you something about the kind of values that we hold. So, for somebody to wake up and beginning to throw those kind of distractive words were demoralizing but soon we will come out of it as we understood these are people who want to bring down the TSA project and that we should not cooperate with them to make it happen.
 And that is why not many people know we have been doing these collections without charging since all these controversies started.
Not only did we refund the fees from March last year, but since late October, all the collections on the platform, have not been charged. We are still waiting for government to close this conversation on the fee. The easiest thing for us to have done is to have stopped collecting that would have created an unnecessary crisis but we are collecting and waiting for some matured conversation to close that.

 


Kindly share this post

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek believes that technology makes life more exciting and helps improve the lives of people around Nigeria and indeed the world. So since 2007, we have devoted our energy to independent reportage of technology and how they affect lives.

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Comments

Uncategorized

Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

Published

on

Kindly share this post

By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

Published

on

Kindly share this post

InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

Published

on

Kindly share this post

Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Trending