Privacy, Power, and Accountability| Amenda Makhetha-Sebake on Privacy, Trust, and the Gap Between Law and Reality

Your personal data is sitting inside institutions you trust; banks, telecoms, technology companies, being processed, protected, and in some cases misused, in ways most people never see and rarely question.

Amenda has spent her career being the person responsible for what happens to it. A former litigator who found her way into data privacy before most organisations knew they needed it, she has built privacy functions from scratch across telematics, telecommunications, and financial services and today leads data privacy at one of South Africa's most significant financial institutions.

In this conversation, she is candid about where most South African organisations really are on POPIA compliance and it is not where they say they are. She talks about the difference between cybersecurity and data protection that even senior professionals confuse, what privacy by design actually looks like inside a data engineering team, and why the growing economy of buying and selling personal data is something the regulator is struggling to contain.

She also asks the question that sits underneath all of it: in an age of generative AI, where your information is already out there in ways you cannot reverse, is privacy still something any of us can genuinely control? Or has it become, as she puts it, a facade?

This is not a compliance conversation. It is a conversation about power, who holds your information, who benefits from it, and who is actually accountable when something goes wrong.