CONSTITUTION DOES NOT PROTECT PERSONAL DATA, PARLIAMENT COMMITTEE TOLD

The 2013 Fijian Constitution lacks specific personal data protection, says Semi Tukana, the Founder of Software Factory Limited & Sole Limited.

Presenting yesterday to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence on the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, Mr Tukana said Fiji remains susceptible to cyber-attacks.

Fiji is in the process of ratifying the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime and legislating the Cybercrime Act 2021.

After having spent 41 years in the industry, Mr

Tukana believes that Fiji should create its own privacy standard and enforce it immediately.

“I need protection around the systems that I built, especially now that we’ve moved into the digital financial banking and trading platform,” he said.

“It might be easier for us to benchmark against the Australian data privacy standard and other similar standards that they adopted and we can customise it for Fiji’s case.

“The standard should be mandatory to be implemented by all businesses and government departments in Fiji.”

He said they recently dealt with two attacks in two organisations that were lucky to still be operating. “These are ransomware. It’s coming close to home now, so now is the time for us to fast-track this particular case in the cyber security space.

“It’s so complex now that there are cyber-attacks happening almost as we speak.”

Mr Tukana also submitted that fines be imposed and cyber security policies implemented for organisations. “If a force has managed to break down the safe, they have the documents right in front of them they can read it. If it’s not encrypted, all the data can be sold and used in a malicious way,” he said.

“Encryption is our final line of defence. There’s some data fields that are so critical that we need to encrypt it.”

He said it was a life and death situation as people could die from stress when cyber-attacks happened. Mr Tukana further submitted that data must be domiciled in Fiji along with its source codes.