Last night, we showed you the public launch of the Briceno Government's National Digital Agenda. That's the plan to launch web portals on the internet so that Belizeans can access government services by going online.
If you're a tech-savvy citizen already used to online banking and bill pay, you might wonder why it has taken so long for the government to get with the program.
Well, the experts say, it's just not that easy. Yesterday, the Director of E-Governance & Digitalization Unit, which falls under the Ministry of Youth, Sports & E-Governance, explained that there are several key legislative changes that had to be made. There were 3 new laws passed to protect citizen privacy and security over the internet:
Alexia Peralta, Director, E-Governance & Digitalization Unit
"The first thing is how do we enable for businesses to be able to conduct transactions online, not just the movement of money but the movement of documents, being able to sign contracts - all of these are very important things and hence why we have now amended and updated our electronic transaction act. It now enables all forms of e-commerce. It allows every citizen the right to be able to use electronic signatures which really means that you no longer need to print a paper and sign a paper for it to be valid, but now that you can sign those digitally, it's now valid and we needed to protect our data, because at the core of what we are talking about is the sharing of information, the data, your data, my date now becomes digitally available, how do we protect that and hence why we have now implemented the data protection act that the minister spoke about."
"The data protection act is based on GDPR which is the global standard for protection of people's data and what it now allows is that you as a Belizean at home, your rights is protected to your privacy and its not just government using your data, but everybody using your data now has to ensure that your privacy is protected. We also have now the public sector data sharing bill, which while we are sharing data among government we also need to do so within proper safeguards. We all know that the best way to have seamless services is for the principle which means that if I go to vital statistics and I get a birth registration, then my registration information should be able to shared with passport if they need to validate my parents name, but how do we ensure that at all times you are protected and that's what the public sector data sharing bill talks about."
"Apart from those bills we also have the electronic evidence act. So acknowledging that sometimes crimes will happen online we also needed to enable our judicial systems, our lawyers, judges to be able to use these evidence that's created online to now be able to prosecute criminals and then of course we have the cyberbullying act that came in place the year before."
