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

There is a standard assumption about African markets, repeated so often it passes for wisdom: privacy is a rich-country luxury. People here care about price and data cost, the thinking goes, and privacy is what you worry about after those problems are solved, somewhere around the third smartphone.

I have heard versions of this in product conversations for years, and this year I shipped a product built on the opposite bet. Camora is a privacy-first memory app for iPhone and Mac, native Swift, in the App Store since June. Photos and recordings stay on your devices, moving between them directly, with no account and no server holding your life. The entire product is the privacy.

Here is the reasoning behind the bet, because the reasoning is the part the standard assumption gets wrong.

When a Silicon Valley product manager says “privacy,” they mean something abstract: ad trackers, data brokers, a corporation reading your behaviour at scale. That version of privacy is invisible, and it is genuinely hard to get anyone anywhere to pay for protection from something invisible.

But that is not what privacy means where I live. In Lagos, privacy is the person physically holding your phone. It is the sibling who knows your unlock code because of course they do. It is handing your phone to someone so they can see one photo, and watching their thumb keep swiping. It is the borrowed phone, the shared phone, the repair shop, the checkpoint. Phones here are communal objects in a way the Western privacy conversation has no vocabulary for, and everyone who lives this reality manages it daily, with folder tricks, second apps, deleted-and-regretted photos, and a running mental map of what is where.

So the assumption has it exactly backwards. Privacy is not less real in this market. It is more concrete here than almost anywhere, because the threat is not a data broker you will never meet. It is a person in the room, and protecting yourself from that is a need people already act on every day with worse tools.

Building for that reality taught me a second lesson, and it was the expensive one: the technology of privacy is the easy part now. Encryption is a library. Keeping data off servers is an architecture decision. What is hard, genuinely and relentlessly hard, is the experience of privacy. Because the moment you remove the account and the server, every convenience they quietly provided becomes your problem. How do two devices find each other and trust each other without a server introducing them? What happens when someone deletes the app and reinstalls it, and their devices remember a pairing that no longer exists? What happens when a transfer is interrupted halfway? I have spent more time on device pairing edge cases than on any feature, and just this month a sync bug taught me that when two sides of a connection each report status in their own way, one of them will eventually be lying to the user.

None of that work is visible in a screenshot. All of it decides whether the product survives, because privacy that costs the user effort gets turned off, and privacy the user cannot trust never gets turned on. Making privacy usable is not part of the product. It is the product.

The wider point is the one I keep returning to in these essays. When someone says “this market will not pay for X,” what they usually mean is “nobody has built X for how this market actually lives.” I wrote in the first of these essays about building bookkeeping around WhatsApp and bank transfers instead of fighting them. This is the same law from another angle. A privacy product built around corporate surveillance anxiety would deserve to fail here. A privacy product built around the person holding your phone is built for a need this market feels every single day.

Honesty requires the caveat, so here it is plainly: Camora is weeks old, and I am not going to stand behind a headline like “Nigerians will pay for privacy” with user charts I do not have. The market will grade the bet, not me, and I will write about what it says either way. What I can already stand behind is the reasoning: the assumption that privacy is a luxury good mistakes an abstract Western framing of privacy for the only one, and it has kept builders from serving a need that is 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 actually work is where every product I build lives. This one just makes the argument more personally than most.

I write one of these every week, on AI and African business as they actually work. If you are building for how a market actually lives, or deciding whether to, this is the conversation I keep having, and I am happy to have it with you.