'Digital Address System Amateurish'

President of policy think tank, IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe has said the country's digital address system is not novel, contrary to what government is trying to make Ghanaians believe.

The Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia had, prior to the launch of the system, showered it with a lot of accolades saying it surpasses the ones used in the United States and the United Kingdom.

But it seems Franklin Cudjoe thinks otherwise.
To him, some of the datasets being used by the app had long existed and further raised issues with the integrity of the app with regards to security.

A dataset is a collection of related sets of information, composed of separate elements and can be manipulated as a unit by a computer.

“To think that these basic mistakes are coming on the back of an app that has obviously been touted as something novel, the point really is that it isn't particularly novel given that it's using engines that already exist. It's just a location sharing thing. To think that you can call it innovative when basically you can input anything to generate any type of address is for me just not on. And I think that the developers should have taken time to deal with these basic challenges. These are not technologically challenging challenges at all, they are too basic,” Franklin Cudjoe argued on Citi FM's news analysis programme, The Big Issue on Saturday.

President Akufo-Addo last Wednesday launched the National Digital Property Addressing System, also known as the Ghana Post GPS in Accra aimed at providing an effective means of addressing every location and place in the country, using an information technology application.

The app has been criticized by experts in the technology space.

Franklin Cudjoe who has been a major critic of the app had claimed that it might have been copied from existing applications.

He clarified that “the part about copying was not to suggest that they did something illegal – the point is that location address using satellites or maps are not necessarily that new.”

Address generation bit amateurish
The policy think tank boss also described the address generation part of the app as amateurish and not well thought through.

“I've read quite a number of reviews by industry watchers and some of the comments they've made are not necessarily helpful – to think that you could input just any data and generate an address in itself sounds amateurish. There are basic web portals where you input any kind of data it could reject it, especially when you are filling forms. And to hear that obviously, that it is something with this app is quite troubling,” he added.

Hosting of app problematic
IMANI Ghana's president also complained about assertions that the app is being hosted outside the borders of Ghana.

“People have also talked about the hosting of this app. Some are saying it's being hosted by Amazon and data protection issues are being raised.”