Telenor has been warned that the sale of its Myanmar business will endanger the Norwegian telecoms company’s 18mn customers in the south-east Asian nation by putting their personal data within reach of the junta.
A Telenor customer in Myanmar has filed a complaint with Norway’s data protection authority, urging the watchdog to probe the company’s planned sale of the business to Lebanon’s M1 Group and ensure it does not infringe his rights under the country’s data protection law.
“If the junta get hold of this data, they can easily target my family members, my friends and my colleagues,” the complainant, an activist living in hiding whose name was redacted from the complaint, told the Financial Times. “No one is safe any more if they are sharing this data.”