PRIVACY AND CYBER-SAFETY FOR SAMOANS TOP PRIORITY FOR MCIT
By: Joshua Lafoa’i
The Government through the Ministry of Communication Information Technology, (MCIT) is prioritizing the privacy and cyber-safety of Samoans while using social media platforms.
The MCIT Chief Executive Officer, Fualau Talatalaga Mata’u Matafeo says the information uploaded onto social media platforms are transferred and stored in Singapore.
This is a major concern for MCIT considering the potential breach of privacy within a third party access and use of these uploaded materials on social media.
“The information we upload, whether its photos, videos and personal information are not stored here in Samoa, they’re not even stored in the Pacific, they’re in Singapore. That’s a cause for worry because we don’t know what they do with that information, what they are doing with it and who has access to it,” Fualau told the COVD-19 Pacific Media Assistance Scheme (PACMAS) awareness workshop.
He says the most concerning part of social media freedom, is the potential threat to individuals that it poses.
Fualau says the release of personal information on social media, whether by the individual or by someone else, exposes a vulnerability of Samoan locals to outside dangers and influences.
“One of the main concerns now, is the amount of forged material we see online. There are companies and individuals who have made a living out of generating fake news stories for the commercial or political gain of their clients,” he said.
“Social media did not come about until around the 2000s. However, in between the years 2017 to 2019, over 150% of the pages and accounts on social media were confirmed fake pages that pushed manipulation campaigns,” he added.
Globally, there have been an estimated count of 3.4 billion social media accounts across multiple platforms in 2019.
In Samoa, the MCIT have found that 90% of the public, have access to a mobile device and internet access.
The CEO of MCIT says the development of network connectivity through the internet has been a successful push by the Government, and part of ensuring the utilization of the improved internet connectivity is safe, is for the Government to protect the data of all Samoans who access the internet.
To make this happen, the MCIT in partnership with the Government of Australia are working on a special unit, the Samoa Computer Emergency Response Team, to handle cyber-information transfers from Samoa to outside hosts, and vice versa.
The Ministry is also clamping down on big tech social media companies like Facebook, proposing they register in Samoa.
“If any individual is affected by an occurrence caused or related to social media platforms, those platforms or companies have to be liable to answer to the laws here in Samoa,” Fualau stated.
This is part of a bigger picture laid out by MCIT and its partners.
The main objective is to protect Samoans private information and to protect individual identity while on social media, has become a critical talking point for not only the Ministry, but for the whole Samoan Government body.
