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Okada Ban: Lagos Govt., Courier Operators ‘War’

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The Lagos state government came under the hammer of courier operators, and supported by the federal government regulatory agency, the Courier Regulatory Department (CRD) of the Nigerian Postal Service (Nipost) on aspects of the states’ traffic law which require them to purchase motorbikes with minimum 200cc engine capacity.

Speaking under the aegis of Association of Nigeria Courier Operators (ANCO) umbrella body of courier operators in Nigeria at the ‘Inter-Agency Relations in Courier Operations workshop’ demanded that Governor Raji Fashola, of Lagos state re-tune the ‘State traffic Law 2012.’

Governor Fashola, a legal practitioner of the inner bar (senior advocate of Nigeria) has received severe knocks from several quarters for the traffic law from which bars commercial motor cycle operation in the state.

Aspects of the law of also bar corporate operators like courier firms and dispatch riders from plying within the metropolis, unless they are type approved motorbikes with minimum of 200cc engine capacity.

Dr. Simon Emeje, assistant post master general, head of CRD said the law contravenes provisions of standing Universal Postal Union (UPU) treaties that made generous provisions for commercial motorcyclists popularly called okada for distribution. The UPU is an organ of the United Nations which Nigeria is signatory to its conventions.

Consequently, Emeje stated that provisions of the new Lagos Traffic Law, especially one which restricted commercial motorcyclists to some designated roads is clear violation of the UPU treaty.

But defending the Lagos state government on the traffic law, Prince Bisi Yusuf, chairman of the Lagos state House of Assembly Committee on Transport, Commerce and Industry (who represented the House Speaker, Hon. deyemi Sabit Ikuforiji), at the workshop it was expedient on the state to enact the law both as a security deterrent and achieving the envisioned ‘Lagos Mega City dream’.

He noted that since the law came into force, reports available show that road crashes related to commercial motorcycle operators have reduced by 75per cent, adding that the courier firms should learn to live by the law and not kick against it.   

“Before the promulgation of the law the State House of Assembly, the rate of motorbike crashes was uncontrollable, but since the law came into force, the crashes have reduced to about 75per cent. That is a big achievement for a law that is under test-run and not up to a year.

“No responsible government will allow its citizen to be maimed in the manner commercial motorcycle operators were doing. Lagos did not even ban ‘Okada’ like we saw outright ban being implemented in Kaduna, Kano and other major urban centres across the country. It is not political, but for security reasons.

The Speaker added that when security is achieved, courier operators can do their businesses with ease and with no apprehension. “It is only when you are alive that you can conduct your business. The State will not count anybody as a sacred cow when he violates the laws, especially by plying the restricted routes,” he noted.

But Dr. Emeje asserted that the international treaties of the UN’s agency to which Nigeria is a signatory, encourages nations and governments to deliver items to any point as the postal sector’s obligation is to reach every citizen.

Nigeria on July 10, 1961 became a member of the UPU, a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates postal policies among member nations, in addition to the worldwide postal system.

Emeje said operators should not only be allowed to carry out their duties to any point in the State, but deserve the right to use any motorcycle of their choice.

“The postal obligation is that they want to reach every citizen. And in doing that, there should be no restriction of vehicles or motorcycles that will be used to reach to the people either on water or on the dry ground.

“Therefore, we have made a case to Lagos State Government that this is inside the Conventions and International Treaties or a global disposition that should be respected. Nigeria or Lagos State should not be an exemption. Courier operators should be allowed to dispatch the parcels they have been assigned to do, even to any part of State”.

He further argued that restriction of the operators to use motorcycles with engine capacity of 200 Cc was not acceptable because it will signal the death of some courier firms, especially the indigenous players.

Critically, Erneje demanded that “a concession for the operators should be granted, in the sense that as far as courier business is concerned worldwide, there is no such restriction. However, we appreciate that for security reasons Lagos State Government had to institute the restriction, but we are saying that they should consider an organisation or industry that is focused delivering goods or parcels to every point in the whole State and the country at large.”

Concurring, Toyin Olufade, president of ANCO said Lagos should adhere to global best practices as it is a state within the federation of Nigeria.

“Whatever modality that will grant concession to courier operators that will make them deliver freely is highly needed presently. The essence of courier is door-to-door service delivery. So, if the equipment is denied them it will defeat the purpose of the service,” said Olufade.

He added that the law impacts adversely on the operators. “The restrict impacts on delivery and subsequently on their income. Apart from that it affects employment disposition of the organisations. And when the employment disposition is adversely affected the economy is affected as a whole.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek checks in the state show that the 200cc engine capacity motorcycles sell for between N250, 000 to N350, 000.

Meanwhile, it would take new courier firms minimum of five bikes to cover Lagos, whereas there are about 281 of them registered with CRD. Thus the industry players may be in dire need of over N3.7 million to retool.
 


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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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.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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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.


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

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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.

 

 

 

 


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