Kenya’s High Court has ruled that mobile phone numbers are personal digital identifiers and cannot be deactivated or reassigned without the informed and verifiable consent of the original subscriber. The decision reframes a routine telecom-administration issue as a digital-identity and privacy question because mobile numbers are often tied to bank alerts, family communications and other sensitive data flows.
Justice Lawrence Mugambi said unilateral deactivation and reassignment expose subscribers to unauthorized disclosure of personal information. The case challenged the practice of deactivating and reassigning numbers after 90 days of inactivity. The court found that Legal Notice 90 of 2025 was unreasonable and arbitrary because it did not adequately account for legitimate reasons a number might go unused for an extended period, while still remaining central to a person’s identity and communications.
The judgment also directs the Attorney General and relevant agencies to establish a regulatory framework by September 19 governing the reassignment of deactivated numbers. The order specifically calls for involvement from the Kenya Prisons Service, the Communications Authority of Kenya and the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. The prison-related element matters because the court said prisoners’ contacts should be preserved during incarceration and available for recovery after release. That adds a rights-based dimension to what might otherwise have been treated as a narrow telecom housekeeping rule.
The ruling lands in a market where identity policy and telecom controls already overlap. Kenya last year restored biometric ID for public healthcare in place of OTP-based verification, and regulators have also pushed some users to declare mobile device identifiers before later narrowing that requirement to focus on residents and importers.
The court treated a mobile number as part of the authentication infrastructure supporting mobile banking, OTP verification, and government services, rather than as a disposable telecom asset. That could affect how Kenyan regulators and service providers handle account recovery, OTP-linked services and subscriber protections when inactive numbers are slated for recycling. It also gives privacy and telecom regulators a judicial marker for how subscriber identifiers should be handled when number reuse policies are rewritten.
Sources: Capital FM Kenya
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By the Mobile ID World Editorial Team
