Privacy in Lagos is the person holding your phone. What building Camora taught me

There’s an assumption about African markets you hear so often it starts to sound true: privacy is something rich countries worry about. People here care about price and data costs, the thinking goes, and privacy comes later, maybe around their third smartphone.

I’ve heard some version of this in product conversations for years, and this year I shipped a product that bets the other way. Camora is a privacy-first memory app for iPhone and Mac, built natively in Swift and in the App Store since June. Your photos and recordings stay on your own devices and move directly between them. There’s no account and no server holding your life. The privacy is the whole product.

Here’s why I made that bet, because the reasoning is where the usual assumption goes wrong.

When a product manager in Silicon Valley says “privacy”, they usually mean something you can’t see: ad trackers, data brokers, a big company studying your behaviour. That kind of privacy is invisible, and it’s hard to get anyone, anywhere, to pay for protection from something they can’t see.

That’s not what privacy means where I live. In Lagos, privacy is the person holding your phone. It’s the sibling who knows your unlock code, because of course they do. It’s handing your phone to someone to see one photo and watching their thumb keep swiping. It’s the borrowed phone, the shared phone, the repair shop, the checkpoint. Phones here get passed around in a way the Western privacy conversation doesn’t really have words for, and everyone who lives like this manages it every day: hidden folders, second apps, photos deleted and then regretted, and a mental list of what’s where.

So the assumption has it backwards. Privacy isn’t less real here. If anything it’s more concrete, because the threat isn’t a data broker you’ll never meet. It’s someone in the same room, and people already protect themselves from that every day, just with worse tools.

Building for that taught me a second thing, and it was the expensive one. The technology side of privacy is the easy part now. Encryption comes in a library. Keeping data off servers is a design decision. What’s really hard is making privacy easy to live with. Once you take away the account and the server, everything they quietly handled for you becomes your problem. How do two devices find and trust each other without a server introducing them? What happens when someone deletes the app, reinstalls it, and their devices remember a pairing that no longer exists? What happens when a transfer stops halfway? I’ve spent more time on device pairing problems than on any feature. Just this month a sync bug showed me that when the two ends of a connection each report their status in their own way, sooner or later one of them tells the user something that isn’t true.

None of that shows up in a screenshot, but it decides whether the product survives. If privacy takes effort, people switch it off. If they can’t trust it, they never switch it on. Making privacy easy to use is most of the job.

It comes back to something I keep saying in these essays. When someone says “this market won’t pay for X”, they usually mean nobody has built X for the way people here actually live. In the first of these essays I wrote about building bookkeeping around WhatsApp and bank transfers instead of fighting them. This is the same idea from another side. A privacy product built around fear of big-company surveillance would deserve to fail here. One built around the person holding your phone is meeting a need people here feel every day.

I should be honest about one thing: Camora is only a few weeks old, and I’m not going to claim “Nigerians will pay for privacy” with user numbers I don’t have. The market will decide if the bet was right, and I’ll write about what happens either way. What I can stand behind is the reasoning. Treating privacy as a luxury mixes up one Western idea of privacy with the only one, and it’s kept builders from a need that’s sitting in plain sight, in every shared phone in every home on this continent.

The gap between how markets are assumed to work and how they really work is where everything I build lives. This one just feels more personal than most.

I write one of these every week, on AI and business in Africa as it actually works. If you’re building for how a market really lives, or trying to decide whether to, it’s a conversation I have a lot, and I’m happy to have it with you.