Ghana Post GPS And Some More.
2017 was a great year. Ghana had just come off the back of a relatively peaceful election, and people had high expectations for the incoming government who had made such promises, that anyone who faced any hardship, anywhere in the world, might have been convinced they could come to Ghana and turn their lives around. Alas, it’s 2021 and we were probably better off in 2017 but I know little about the intricacies of government so let’s stick to why you came here and leave the economics of nation-building to the…well, nation builders.
Ghana Post GPS: Digital Addressing System.
What is it? This is a short description that can be found on the homepage of their website here.
GhanaPostGPS is Ghana’s official digital property addressing system which covers every inch of the country and ensures that all locations in the country are addressed. With GhanaPostGPS, every location has a unique digital address.
So every location has a unique digital address. This is good for health services, emergency services, and couriers. All you have to do is send a business your digital address, and they zoom over to your place with your food or your new size 10.5 Nike Hyperdunks with the blue finish and the white soles, perfect for throwing threes from the halfcourt line as the fans cheer you on from the stands, you dribble past one player, ankle breaker for the second, step back, shoot! Swissshhh…I apologize for drifting off. Now I don’t know anyone who has used the system like this nor have I ever used it like this but it is a wonderful idea behind a working system.
I think it’s amazing, and you probably also think it is wonderful that you don’t have to walk around trying to recall whether your street name is spelled “Kobina Sakyi”, “Kobena Sekyi”, or “Kobina Sekyi”. It makes finding places very easy if you know how to use the service.
If you’ve been following the news you’d realize that digitalization, seems to be a very major point for the current government. To some, it seems like this is all they focus on, as the pockets of the average worker, run dry and the tears of the youth get lapped up from their cheeks like a dog, by the hot equatorial sun. Then again, the focal point of this piece is not political, so pardon me for straying once again.
Although this project has been praised by many, there are others who think this project could have been implemented, using existing technologies like the location labeling on Google in order to benefit from future feature updates to Google’s systems. In an article uploaded to the Citi News Room’s website, I found this statement, by Mr. Bright Simmons.
“It appears someone did not sit down and think through this [National Digital Addressing System] because if you thought through this properly, you will use Google’s own technology to apply labels so that when the time comes to benefit from other google functionalities, that integration will be seamless and will not cost you [government] additional funding.”
- Mr. Bright Simmons, Vice President IMANI Africa.
You can read the article here: Tap me.
Why I wrote this post.
Humans are known for being creative and generally find multiple uses for items suited for one thing, like how African mothers find it so convenient to use their footwear as child-seeking missiles when their kid does something stubborn and tries to run away before feeling their motherly wrath.
Found a whole list of things people that ended up using different or products that had to change their brand after one or two mishaps, good read: it’s here.
Somewhere in October, the NSS postings arrived and I saw I had been posted to The National Health Insurance Authority, in the Komenda Edina Eguafo Abirem constituency. It’s not close to where I stay but I can get there if I take about two cars or just drive. I was curious to know what the place looked like but I didn’t want to leave home and sit through that commute because of the hot equatorial sun I spoke about earlier on and with the current costs of transportation, I can’t even tell if the fare is the same as 2 months ago’s.
Streets hot.
To satisfy my curiosity, I wondered if it would be possible to find the digital address of the building and view it in Google StreetView. Turns out I could. The first thing I did, was Google “NHIS District Offices” and I found this.
CK-0003–8600 – this is their digital address. Well displayed. Lovely. If I place it into the Ghana Post GPS app, I get a location marker pointing to the physical location of the NHIS center.
Then I try to do a StreetView of this place by dragging the human icon in the bottom right corner of the screen, onto the marker and activating the street view functionality. This cannot be found on the mobile app version so it has to be the web version.
Your placement of the human icon will determine how accurate your view of the address will be but basically, with enough tweaking, you can see what you are looking for but it is not as accurate as you would expect. It does not provide pinpoint accuracy but I can still see what I want to see. I can’t see the insides of the building though, but this is enough for my purposes.
The address CK-0003–8600, in a deconstructed form, CK-0003 is the postal code for the area, C refers to the region of the location (Central Region), while K refers to the district (Komenda Eguafo), 8600 is the unique address within the postal code. The Postal Code and the Unique Address come together to form the unique digital address.
So when you type CK-0003 in the Ghana Post GPS search, there’s a highlighted section that we can safely assume is the area within that postal code. So my workplace is somewhere within that beautiful red outline.
After this discovery, I panicked a bit. This means anyone, who knew my digital address, could find where I lived or just know the area I lived in, and verifying the address from the plates on the walls will not be difficult to do. This is unsettling (for me) and true I am not worth assassinating but my point is I enjoy my privacy. The only possible way for someone to see your digital address is if they work in a government agency where you have gone to provide it, or they work in a bank or some other institution that requires it as part of a registration process. I would like to believe this data is 100% secure but nothing is 100% guaranteed.
Except for the fact that the sky will always be blue and Ghanaians will once again vote for one of the two political giants, come 2024.
It go bee.
Final thoughts, try and ask people or organizations who take your data what they plan on using the data for and what protocols they have to go through, to release your data, who is releasing your data? You might find that they have nothing stopping them from giving your phone number or email address to SMS marketers or email marketers as I received some messages regarding electronics and mattresses since the NSS posting came out. I wonder where they got my number from.
Today it might be your phone number, tomorrow, anyone at all could know where you live. Stay safe and stay protected.
I found this short post about a hack in 2015. Have a good read >> Tap here.
