The PNM Gov­ern­ment is keep­ing T&T in the Stone Age, fail­ing to pro­tect cit­i­zens’ in­for­ma­tion by not ful­ly pro­claim­ing the Da­ta Pro­tec­tion Act 2011.

This is the sit­u­a­tion at a time when peo­ple’s lives are stored on phones, there’s Chat­G­PT tech­nol­o­gy and the US Gov­ern­ment has banned Tik­Tok on gov­ern­ment-is­sued de­vices fol­low­ing se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns, says Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Jear­lean John.

John ex­pressed con­cerns in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day in de­bate on an Op­po­si­tion mo­tion call­ing for Gov­ern­ment to ful­ly pro­claim the Da­ta Pro­tec­tion Act 2011.

“Trinidad and To­ba­go’s da­ta pro­tec­tion is in­ad­e­quate, ba­sic and in dire need of procla­ma­tion of the DPA,” she added.

John said if the law draft­ed 11 years ago isn’t fit for pur­pose now as Gov­ern­ment said, it means “we need da­ta pro­tec­tion more than ever.”

She not­ed ad­vances in big da­ta an­a­lyt­ics, the grow­ing im­por­tance of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and the fact that lives are now stored on phones.

“There’s grow­ing aware­ness that the apps and ser­vices we use dai­ly can col­lect vast amounts of da­ta. High pro­file in­ci­dents and scan­dal have shed light on the per­ils of over­shar­ing on­line, an ex­am­ple played it­self out in the pub­lic do­main dur­ing the re­cent Car­ni­val, the way com­pa­nies have pre­vi­ous­ly abused per­mis­sions to har­vest da­ta.”

John gave the ex­am­ple of Chat­G­PT which us­es di­a­logue as one of the pri­ma­ry ways to col­lect high­ly per­son­al in­for­ma­tion.

“The soft­ware’s pow­er means it’s easy for the user to for­get it’s an AI sys­tem and to be­gin chat­ting as you might with a hu­man. In do­ing so, you may re­veal things you’d nev­er type in­to a search en­gine... and all of these per­son­al facts are now tied to your email and your phone num­ber.

“Be­cause of the in­dis­crim­i­nate way Chat­G­PT gath­ers da­ta, much of it will re­fer to peo­ple, and will in­clude things they’ve writ­ten or said over the last few years or decades, in the most var­ied con­texts, in­clud­ing on so­cial me­dia, per­son­al web­sites, and in chat or even email threads, if they’re pub­licly avail­able.

“Much of Chat­G­PT’s pow­er lies in its abil­i­ty to bring all these dis­parate in­puts to­geth­er and analyse them on a hith­er­to im­prac­ti­cal scale. In­evitably, this will re­sult in it find­ing and mak­ing ex­plic­it con­nec­tions/as­so­ci­a­tions that may not be oth­er­wise ap­par­ent.

“When users in­ter­ro­gate Chat­G­PT, it could ex­pose in­for­ma­tion or ru­mours about them­selves or oth­ers that peo­ple would not want made pub­lic. Since Chat­G­PT has no un­der­stand­ing of what it pro­duces, it will not hold back in­for­ma­tion that might be em­bar­rass­ing or lead to ca­reers or re­la­tion­ships be­ing wrecked. It will be very hard to pre­vent this even when ba­sic safe­guards are built in.”

John al­so not­ed the Tik­Tok app, used wide­ly in T&T, which car­ries much of its users’ in­for­ma­tion.

“The US gov­ern­ment has banned Tik­Tok on fed­er­al gov­ern­ment-is­sued de­vices due to na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns over its Chi­na-based par­ent com­pa­ny. The US fears that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment may lever­age Tik­Tok to ac­cess those de­vices and US user da­ta.

“All of this is hap­pen­ing in a dig­i­tal­ly con­nect­ed world and Gov­ern­ment re­mains pa­per bound and based, keep­ing T&T in the Stone Age sat­is­fied to use the Cab­i­net to sanc­tion il­le­gal spy­ing and cap­ture of cit­i­zens’ pri­vate da­ta in­stead of ap­prov­ing procla­ma­tion and op­er­a­tional­iza­tion of the DPA.

“Every area of our lives is af­fect­ed. When I pur­chase a lip­stick at MAC in West Mall, they want my name, ad­dress, phone num­ber,” she added not­ing a sim­i­lar re­quest when she pur­chased sun­screen, sain John.

“I had to ask the at­ten­dant are you cash­ing or not? She in­sist­ed that to con­clude the sale she at least re­quired my name and tele­phone num­ber ... If the Gov­ern­ment can­not pro­tect the rights and free­doms of our cit­i­zens, then it’s the Gov­ern­ment that isn’t fit for pur­pose.”