Digital Colonization with Samantha Simms

Welcome to the Serious Privacy podcast, where Ralph O'Brien and Dr. K Royal, ( Paul Breitbarth was out) meet with the phenomenal Samantha Simms. We had the best time going deep on some really substantive issues, even starting with Samantha's answer on the unexpected question. Join us as we discuss key issues and the digital colonization.

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From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

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Tim 0:53

You're listening to the award-winning Serious Privacy Podcast sponsored by Trust Arc. Please welcome your hosts, Paul Breitbart, Ralph O'Brien, and Dr. Kay Royal.

Ralph 1:06

Hello and welcome to the podcast. Today comes an interesting moment because England seems to be hit up in a heat wave. And I'm going to compare that to the tropical climate of Jamaica, where for a change, parts of the United Kingdom are currently experiencing a heat wave where the temperature goes 36-37 degrees Celsius. That's about 95 to 100 in Fahrenheit. Against that backdrop, I'm delighted to welcome Samantha Sims, leading data protection and privacy professional from Jamaica, board advisor on all things data, and we're going to have a conversation about digital sovereignty, amongst other things. Samantha herself is passionate about helping organizations building trust through responsible data management, data protection government, and ongoing legislative requirements. In a world where we often talk about data as currency, I think Samantha's going to bring some valuable insights to us today about how we can take control of the information and talk about where we are in respect to the rest of the world and our local jurisdictions. And so, welcome to the podcast, Samantha. My name is Ralph O'Brien.

K 2:26

And I'm Kay Royal, and welcome to Serious Privacy. Absolutely delighted to have you here, Samantha. I've been to your wonderful country once, dreamed about going lots and lots of time because my favorite movie of all times is Cool Running. I know you probably hear that a lot, but a very few people probably have it as their favorite movie of all times. And it is, and I'm a big geek. I'm a big geek. But now I love it so much I can even think about playing it on TV and I start crying. And none of the stores there had any cool running shirts. They weren't allowed to sell them because, I guess, of the trademarks. And I was like, I'm in Jamaica. I can't get a cool running shirt. But that's okay. I bought plenty of Jamaica shirts. Wonderful. Wonderful. But thank you for joining us. It is quite a delight to have you. If you listen to the podcast, you'll know that we do the unexpected question. I did not bring my list of hilarious questions with me, so I tried to look one up real quickly before we started. In 20 years, what do you hope is obsolete? And that's a serious one as well as a funny one. So take it whichever direction you'd like. One thing I wish to see made obsolete is inequity. Oh, yes. She took it to the serious side, and I got nothing to top that one. That's what I want to see made obsolete.

Ralph 3:55

I think we could all agree with that.

K 3:58

Absolutely agree with you there. Yeah. Yeah, I think she just peeled mine and Ralph's answers. Mine was going to be a telephone. We're not going there. I don't know where Ralph was going to go, but I'm going to double down on Samantha's answer and go, yeah, inequities.

Ralph 4:11

Inequity works works for me as well. And I must admit, yeah, a more inclusive world would be would be a sort of a follow-up to that one. If I had to go for something that on the more trivial side, though, I was going to say, yeah, actually that's not trivial at all. I was going to say that I've now moved to electric car, fossil fuels, but I guess that's just quite a serious one as well.

K 4:36

You're just supposed to be the weird questions, people. Y'all had to take it to the serious side, but you know what? I can't argue with that. As a woman in a man's world, both in law and tech and everything else, Samantha, I can't argue with that. And I'm from the deep south. I'm from Mississippi. So I grew up watching inequities. And my best friend of all times, we just hit our 40th year for our high school class reunion. So my best friend from back in high school, she and I could only see each other at school. And if that doesn't tell you what inequities with this world is in, then I don't, yeah. It's ridiculous what we got. All right, let's move on to a lighter topic.

Ralph 5:16

Yeah. So yeah, we normally give our guests an opportunity just to say a few words about themselves before we dive in. So I did a really poor job of introducing you, Samantha. Having having looked down your history, you've done some really cool and interesting stuff. So perhaps you want to start there and let people know who you are and where you come from.

SPEAKER_03 5:35

Yeah, so my name's Samantha Sims, and I am in Jamaica right now because I've been in Jamaica for a while, opening and maintaining the Caribbean desk for the information collective, my consultancy. But as you can hear from my accent, Jamaica is not my accent. I'm not Jamaican by accent. So I'm born and raised in London, in Brixton, in the heart of the Jamaican community. Right? Oh wow. And I only I've only been based up here for the last four nearly five years, working on the Caribbean desk. Before that, what did I do? So the consultancy had been operating for it's been operating for eight years. But we've been operating across the US, Canada, UK, Middle East, Asia. But now I'm so heavily focused on work in the Caribbean, US, the UK, some Canadian work. And also what I call bridging the Atlantic, and that is connecting Africa, the US, and the UK and the Caribbean. Nice. So that we bridge the Atlantic and we start to have these conversations, these important connections that have been we're separated in the past.

Ralph 6:59

There is a triangle there, isn't there, of history of connection between Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, of course, that we have to acknowledge moving forwards. Absolutely. But actually, for all the terrible things that that triangle has caused, there are actually some deep connections now in actual allowing people to spend time and travel between those areas and experience similar cultures, would you not say?

SPEAKER_03 7:23

Yeah, there's been efforts to, for example, Ghana and some other countries have allowed for visa-less travel, visa-free travel, which is massively important for people who have passports that are limited in that way. But also on a digital front, there is that connection as well. But in terms of my actual background, I've worked globally since 2007. I came out of working for the UK government, did central government, local government, then went on to work at Link Vaders. And that was my first global role. And since then operated globally. So it's only natural for me to be able to navigate the patchwork of different laws as they are popping up, as you know what it's like right now in the privacy space, but also to see the connection and to find. And that's been part of my a huge part of my journey and what I've continued to do. One of the main reasons why I opened the Caribbean desk for the information collected was because what I didn't want to see happen, and we've seen it before time and time again, is people who do not understand the culture of a region come in and define privacy for the region. Because then it can never work for the people.

Ralph 9:37

That's fascinating because we live in a, as you say, an interconnected world, and actually one of the topics you wanted to talk about was digital sovereignty. Complete aside, I'm actually glad you mentioned Ghana because England played them in the football last night, and I actually messaged Teki Akuete, the former Ghanese commissioner, just to say, well done, because they held us to a draw. Anyway, so we've got this sort of global approach where where technology breaks down borders and allows us to talk, but you wanted to talk about digital sovereignty and holding on to the culture of a region. So I guess the question then is how do you manage that kind of pushfall between big global technology giants and localized culture?

SPEAKER_03 10:19

Let's be honest. We are firstly, here's one thing I'll say. Jamaican culture is it finds itself in so many different parts of the world, right? Spread through the music. You talked about people recognize the Jamaican sprint team. The flag is one of the most discernible flags there are, right? So punch is hard. And even when we look at music, you find Jamaican music at the base or Jamaican influence at the base of a lot of the music we listen to. Okay. So I think sometimes we forget that within our own areas we have a a very strong culture. Many countries have very strong self-power. But where are we today? Where it's the situation that we're facing is that I I just I call it out nowadays. It's techno feudalism. Yanis Farakis calls it out, but it is straight technofeudalism, and we have all set walked into this.

K 11:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:34

Okay. I used to sit and think, why can't any of my British clients, my small, my startups, get funding? In the UK, they could nobody was getting really any funding at Series A. Sorry, at Seed and Series A. The British mentality was to hold off until nearly Series B. Why then we just we wouldn't we lost that sector. So as dominant players, we've all become, every single one of us, actually, in across the world. We are almost all tied to Fang, as we call them, right? And now we're going towards Magos, right? The new acronym is in.

Ralph 12:17

Yeah, it is. Oh, I was actually looking at a social media app last night that's been brought out from Europe called W, I believe.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Yes, right.

Ralph 12:24

Which is W Social, which is very much supposed to be like an alternative to Twitter, uh, or sorry, X as it is this days, but it says made in Europe for the world, governed by European law, hosted on European infrastructure, but designed for conversations on humans around the world. So is there a trend then that we've kind of got all this globalization and feudalization? Is there like a counter-trend beginning to spring up where we're saying, hey, perhaps we don't want all to be ruled by without offense, K, large American tech conglomerates or Chinese infrastructure or European laws, and you want something a bit more local, a bit more, as you say, culturally nuanced? Or do you see this as a problem that's going to just exacerbate?

K 13:10

One thing I want to jump in there real quickly is because Samantha, you said the culture as well, and Ralph, you just brought it up. It's long been one of the things, and fans have heard me preach on this on prior ones. So I'm gonna, I'm not gonna preach too hard. Privacy is rooted in the culture because, and there's even new jobs that spring up. I think they started springing up about five, five, ten years ago on probably a line with GDPR, in privacy translation. So come people that specialize in translating privacy notices and privacy policies into local language because it's so rooted in culture that a one-to-one word translation does not get you the context of what it is that privacy is addressing or data protection is addressing. So, privacy, probably more so than any other technology field out there, is deeply rooted in culture. You can see it in the differences and the definitions of sensitive personal data. All arguments aside, to Dan Solob, he knows he and I are going to die on this hill together one day because he believes nothing should be sensitive data. And I believe there's absolutely a difference in sensitive data. But you look at the difference in definitions of sensitive data, even between the US and Europe, which special categories of data, the US didn't even really have one until the US state started passing laws. You had to assume that if we had a sectoral law on it, that maybe we thought that data was special to be protected. But yeah, so sorry, side note, culture is very deeply important in the field that we work in and how we handle data and technology advancements.

SPEAKER_03 14:51

And I want to touch back on that point, actually, because you're absolutely right. So let's think about culture. What is what is private information in one culture is not the same as in another. Okay. And so when you come with a layer of rules that do not fit the culture, you have a set of rights that will not be utilized. If they are not understood and they don't work with the culture, how can you bring it? You can help implement that. So let's think about it. We've already seen it, right? Do you remember the rights of subject access was something that was really only ever enforced in the UK and Ireland? Why? Not recently. I'd say to say before, right? Not recently. But why was that? Because we already, in a common law system, we have the right of disclosure as part of our legal process. So it started to run I wish it was in parallel, a little bit before. As soon as somebody was thinking, yeah, something's not right. Let me put in a subject access request. So we saw numerous companies were buckling under the pressure of subject access requests. I can think of numerous employment cases that got settled because they'd rather settle than complete the subject access request.

Ralph 16:19

I tend to get our parking finds that way.

SPEAKER_03 16:22

I love it, love it. We weren't seeing that elsewhere. So what we want is we want if we're going to give people rights, there's no point in just coming in with a GDPR light and implementing that in countries that hadn't even been considering privacy in this way. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, in a small culture where everyone knows everyone, where you know if the receptionist's grandmother's ex-husband was ill two weeks ago and therefore she has to travel for the funeral. And now we cannot consider that information as that information is now subject to data protection because we've got to play like we don't know it. That does a what well So what's the problem then? It would only and this is why I opened the desk because I saw what was happening. I saw the we were all automatically being asked to adopt EU standards that were designed for the EU and which is a very different culture. Yeah.

Ralph 17:34

So you've got two influences here. So you're saying you asked me to have regulation from the EU, but at the same time you're getting technology coming in from the US.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

Yeah.

Ralph 17:43

So the US comes from a different starting point again. The EU's got this sort of more fundamental rights approach. The US has started from a be nice to your customer-consumer uh approach. Okay, you tell me I'm wrong.

K 17:55

Yeah, I say the US companies probably come at it from a different perspective, but I'm kind of hard on these big US companies and what their ulterior motives are, which they're not hidden at all. I don't know if the definition of ulterior includes hidden is not hidden. They're after the dollar. We all know that. And Apple has tried to change its public perception by touting all of these privacy things it has in place. And some of it's done well. The biometrics used to unlock a phone are stored on that phone. It doesn't go back to Microsoft or Apple or whatever. So I I do like that, but trust me, the things it's bragging on may be true, but don't go looking for anything that it's not bragging on because it's got some privacy deprivations in there, shall we say.

SPEAKER_03 18:44

And also, privacy is not a standalone subject in the world, right? It's part of a wider settled geopolitics. And when you are sitting here in a region that has become part of the US imperial, right?

Ralph 19:00

State That's one way of putting it.

SPEAKER_03 19:03

Yeah, I never quite understood how it feels to be subjugated until I started spending more time here. Wow.

Ralph 19:18

Again, going back to my friend Techie, she she often calls it digital slavery. Yeah, techno slavery, yeah. This idea that because uh do you think it's down to just the global influence and the global culture and the way technology has connected us all and we're all clinging to similar platforms? Or do you think it's down because there aren't any homegrown alternatives? What's your kind of root in and root out of this, perhaps?

SPEAKER_03 19:45

Let me tell you what's really interesting. So I'm not sure that we're at digital slavery yet. I think we're in digital colonialism. That for sure, without a doubt, right? Very few of us and across the board, all of a sudden the EU has woken up and said to itself, okay, digital and data, the mandate that they have around digital and data, they're going to be pushing that. The UK's all of a sudden woken up just very recently and realized that hold on, we have pretty much zero control, hence why we banned children from using the social media at 16, right? That's just some sledgehammer to crack up that could have been dealt with years ago.

Ralph 20:30

We just did an episode on that.

K 20:32

It's going live today if it hadn't already, I think.

SPEAKER_03 20:36

So what's interesting is going back to your point around the money, one of the good things that happens for small island developing states, right, is you do not have a population big enough for the tech companies to want to deploy their tech. So what happens is you have a lot of locally grown tech. So the Caribbean, all the food delivery apps are our own.

K 21:06

You're saying there's not a whole lot of Uber or DoorDash or Lyft there?

SPEAKER_03 21:10

We have Uber, and Uber also has to be very careful because when Uber first came in, everyone's like, because we have these two issues. Firstly, there is a mindset that when you've been subjugated, you almost want what the others have. You have to remember that Grand Britain, Grand US is streamed into the public consciousness in other parts of the world by way of television, yeah, music video, and whatever we see on social media that the algorithms helpfully push towards certain populations.

K 21:52

Yeah. The design of the addiction, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:55

Absolutely. So they if you're if you are not well traveled, you do not see the underbelly, the nastiness.

K 22:06

You think Texas is like the TV shows, and California are all Hollywood, and yeah, and New York is the city that never sleeps. And that's basically the impression you have of the US. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 22:18

And likewise for UK. I remember I've got family members in abroad, and I remember them coming out just over to London, and they're from like a major metropolitan. And they're like, hey, it's pretty modern here, right? And then I realize they think it looks like Hollywood Twist. Yeah.

Ralph 22:36

Yeah, it it yeah, England isn't all Oxford and Harry Potter and Big Ben. Oddly enough, my my cousin's been living with me recently, and he brought his girlfriend over from the US, who he's now emigrating over there, and she had never been out to the US. And he took her into London and they did Big Ben and the Tower of London and the London Eye and all of that kind of stuff. And she came back and I said, Oh, what did you like about the UK or anything? She said, Meal deals from Sainsbury's.

SPEAKER_03 23:06

I can actually.

Ralph 23:08

You can get a you can get a sandwich and a drink and a packet of crisps for five pounds.

K 23:12

And you're happy, yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Ralph 23:16

That was the thing. I'm gonna take the meal deals back to America.

K 23:20

But to be fair, Europe is traveling from country to country in the main European Union that we're talking about. It's like going from state to state in the U.S. And the U.S. really does have multiple cultural regional differences. The South is vastly different than the Northeast and Texas. People think Texas and the South are the same. They are not. The deep South is different than the other South, and California is all on its own. It's going to become an island. And then you've got the Midwest and the Southwest. And it's very different cultural. But thinking about people having these ideas of what a place is like, I would like to say that I was a little bit more not expecting Jamaica to be all cool runnings. But to be fair, that's the picture the majority of the world probably has in Jamaica, right? Is the movie Cool Runnings and marijuana. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 24:15

It's a lot more than that. It's way more than that. Firstly, it's the only English-speaking nation within this side of the region. It is a bustling business hub. Kingston is a business city. It is a main city for conferences. We have there is a lot of organization. A lot of organizations are based here.

K 24:39

The food is amazing. Let's just go there. The food is amazing.

SPEAKER_03 24:43

Yeah. Food is great. And we also had a lot of American influence in terms of food as well. But and Jamaica is not the Caribbean. The Caribbean is far wider. We have 48 million people across the Caribbean. Jamaica only has three million people. Cuba is a far has a far bigger population. Dominican Republic, Haiti, very the quite populous places, right? But there's a lot of difference across the region. But whichever way, what's what happens is people want what has been streamed into them. Yeah. If you tell me we eat KFC and McDonald's, I'm going to want that.

Ralph 25:32

So do you think you're losing regional identity then? Or do you is that your concern?

SPEAKER_03 25:37

That's not my concern. My concern is power. And the misuse of power. Yes. The dominance and mis the dominance that these parties have. And also we've got to call it out. Let's be honest. These tech bros, as we call them, we where are we seeing them today? Standing side by side big next with a political party attending state delegations. Right? This is what power looks like in autocratic states. And we have business businesses leading. Businesses that have control of all of our data can then design algorithms to decide what we see, what we think, who we interact with.

K 26:36

And they use it. They use it, they sell it, they lease it, they give it away. And the majority of us, even those of us in this field that we understand the problem, don't understand the technology. Most of us could probably never imagine why would you think this leads to this and you take these three things and it means what? Who even comes up with that stuff?

SPEAKER_03 27:00

But I don't think it's a technology that's our problem. It's not that we don't understand the technology. I don't think we understand the game plan. They're laying it out bare in front of us, but then we almost don't want to admit it. And I have to say to you, this is where digital slavery comes in. Because I'd be damned if my ancestors toiled and managed to achieve emancipation, worked hard to come this far for us only to be pushed back in. Yeah, it's still slavery.

K 27:33

To be subject to someone else's whims and idiosyncrasies that we have no visibility into.

Ralph 27:40

That's limited to Jamaica and those countries with the colonial history either. I think in the UK, one of the reasons they're looking at a social media ban for under 16s is because they're tired of trying to get the companies to do anything different, right? They're tired of trying to regulate the large tech giants and finding that difficult to do. And actually, even if they do start talking about social media bands, you don't actually have America on the phone saying, hey, don't break our businesses. Don't do horrible things. This is a bad international thing you're doing.

unknown 28:11

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

K 28:12

The lawsuit, the court case that won on the technology addiction design, the judge just denied them a new trial. So that's one win. They do not get a new trial-level trial to look at it. Now it has to go to the court of appeals on the judicial merits, not on the facts. When you appeal, and I don't know if it's this way everywhere, maybe this is just me being stupid, but the trial court is a court on the facts. And then when you go up, you can only appeal on judicial merits. You cannot appeal on the facts. The facts have already been established. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Ralph 28:46

But that's again the US legislating for US platforms. And should the rest of the world have to wait for the US to legislate on US platforms in order for there to be changes at home? Is that is that kind of the point you're making, some humphrey, as well?

SPEAKER_03 29:01

No, it goes it really does go back to powers. Who has a seat at the table? Right? Look at the G7. Who has a seat at these tables? So let's take G7, let's take Fang, let's take Mango. We've pretty much got world commands there, and then you put into the banking system. So when you look at that situation, there are people from very few different types of backgrounds. Yeah. And the human being is naturally seeking to protect itself.

Ralph 29:36

In groups and out groups, yeah. Absolutely. People like people who like themselves as they say.

K 29:42

Yeah, which is stupid, right? When we were talking about inequities earlier, I got to thinking, and what we hear from a lot of people on diversity is we need to welcome diversity of opinion. We need to welcome this. And I'm like, you don't even need to welcome it or celebrate it. It needs to be the baseline standard. We need diversity, or we're not going to have a holistic viewpoint.

SPEAKER_03 30:06

But it's more than that. It's about the fact that if I, and I've got a talk called From Consumers to Architects, right? If I am forever the consumer and I'm not an active participant in the digital economy as an architect, and I'm merely a consumer, and not just I, my pretty much my entire region. Yeah. Let's see, let's talk about this in actual context. The infrastructure, the telco infrastructure here is owned by one company. BT owned it through competition laws, it had to be opened up. It's owned by one company. And all of that data flows back into the US. It all flows back to the U, back to Miami. Under which protections? Yeah. What happened through the act? What's happened then? What's happened to the Stalled Communications Act?

Ralph 31:08

I had a very similar conversation with a customer yesterday, actually. We were talking about international transfers and the risk of legal access from, say, the US, with the whole EU-US data transfer background to that. And they said, but it's okay because Microsoft have told us it's hosted in Europe. And I thought for a second and then said, Where who owns Microsoft? Where's Microsoft based? And they said, Microsoft is based in Seattle in the US. And I said, Do you think it matters one damn to Microsoft if they're owned out of US in Seattle that the data's in a European data center? If somebody puts in a request, somebody leans on them hard enough and said, Do you think it matters it's in a European data center? Because if it's going through the tech company there, then you can you will pretty much have to open yourself to that possibility of access, right? And that is a sort of a factor you have to consider now when you're looking at anything, it's because what other locally grown choices do people have? A reasonable price, I think, is the is one of the biggest things. Have they grown so big now that there's no stopping them? Is company bigger than country? When you consider the enforcement budget of, say, locally here, the ICO versus the legal budget of, say, Metagroup, is the ICO going to want to get involved and take enforcement action? Will they be tied up in court for years?

SPEAKER_03 32:30

So I think every time we talk about enforcement, we talk about the top layer. My problem is, and it always starts with the foundation. Where we've got to today, and I always tell people like, oh, AI is new, AI governance. We've been working on this stuff for years. We've all been working on this. We've been working on automated decision making that was used to produce for machine learning outputs and in turn AI outputs, right? For 10 years now. This is no new stuff. So if you have, if I have no control of the foundation, what happens in the speed that we're moving with the development of technology and the outputs it can produce? What happens in two years' time when you are extrapolating data from a particular area, ingesting it, deciding to crunch it using your own algorithms and then spitting it back out? Enforcement takes two, three years to get there. So when we talk about, I think sovereignty, as much as I talk about digital sovereignty, we need to be quite honest with ourselves. I think we've almost the horse is bolted, right? And stable doors shut. That's what I think. I think we've got there, to be honest. They are almost too big for us to compete with, and we do not have the antitrust or competition laws that can prevent that on a on a on an international basis, right? But I do think that we are at a point, an inflection point, where we all need to stand and look and say, what are we doing? How are we building? Do we have the right voices included? That's one part of it. But to what extent can we make our infrastructures different? It cannot all be about how much it costs. And the World Bank put out a report very recently, I think it was within the last few days, on digital sovereignty. And it taunt about small island developing states, we call them SIDs, and said that effectively we do not have the budget to have our own infrastructure. That is true, right? We can, and I can't speak for other regions because this what's being felt here is being felt by the majority of the world. The only people really, America's top tier, China's top tier. I don't know what's happening in India, do much around that. Russia put in the data localization law to prevent against this. They were quite clever requiring that what 11 years ago or so now. But then the EU, UK sit beneath that, Canada sit beneath that, and then it's the rest of us. We're all stuck in this layer where we, as I say, we have very little control over the infrastructure. Hardware's made in China, software is coming out of the US, rules are coming out of Europe. Thank God Europe has got that little foothold until the threat of tariffs. And what do the rest of us have?

Ralph 35:53

I had an interesting one the other day with just a taxi company, actually. I ordered a taxi to pick me up from the station. And they said, Oh, well, WhatsApp you, the uh the whatever. And I was said, I don't have WhatsApp. They're like, What? And I said, I don't have WhatsApp. How are we going to message you then? And I'm like, SMS, phone numbers. And it I find it incredible. You talk about digital inclusion. There's an awful lot of digital exclusion because it is now assumed you have WhatsApp. It is now assumed that you have Facebook, right? I've had people say, Oh, the like in my social life, I play games and there's a gaming group. And they said, Oh, great, just join our Facebook site and we'll organize all our games on there. And I'm like, nope, don't have that, right? Because I've chosen not to. Now you may just call me awkward, fine, but at the same token, there is this assumption now that we're all on these platforms. We're all on Insta, we're all on Snap, we're all on WhatsApp, we're all on whatever. And as I said, I think I've said this before on the podcast, I was in a car park the other day, and I saw some people perhaps in their 80s, 70s, who were trying to park a car and they couldn't pay for the parking because they didn't have an app, they didn't have a phone capable of using an app. And they actually had to leave the car park because they couldn't pay any other way. They couldn't go to the website, they didn't have the app. And I know these are fringe cases, but to me it's we're all fringe at some point, right? We're all fringe at some point.

SPEAKER_03 37:17

They're not fringe, because digital exclusion is something that we started to see, particularly during the COVID period. But but they're not fringe, but they're they are around application, uh the application layer, right? Do you want access to this particular application? So I'm telling you, WhatsApp is used for everything in the Caribbean. Every business uses WhatsApp pretty much. I communicate with the telecoms companies via WhatsApp. That's how we do everything. Primarily because you is free, effectively. It's not free, it just relies on data. But so that's a whole wealth of data that's there. Well, it also allows people to connect, and there's benefits of these large systems, right? Through WhatsApp, people have been able to connect and maintain family lives, maintain culture, spread culture, etc. But it doesn't mean that just because we use these systems that we don't want to also be able to have ownership of the infrastructure that it sits on, right? And I think that's what's important. We're seeing lots of stuff happening within the Caribbean. I'm really proud of it. Some of the proposals that I've been discussing and with people, we've started to see that make national policy in Jamaica. We're pushing towards digital sovereignty in insofar as it can happen. Building out data embassies, that's a new plan for the for Jamaica. Because we're people are starting to understand the richness of the data that is produced in these regions.

Ralph 39:02

That's amazing. And actually, we have to, at some point, I'm afraid, we could carry on talking for ages, I'm sure. Hours and hours and hours because of it. Samantha and I actually had a call last week, and I didn't I didn't want to hang up because we had a fantastic conversation, and I'll make sure it's not our last one, by the way, Samantha. But as we say on a podcast, people can only walk the dog for so long. So I think on that positive note, you've ended it there with the the building of those good localized digital infrastructure and making some great moves towards retaining the culture. I think we're gonna have to say goodbye. So thank you very much, Samantha. Any last words from yourself?

SPEAKER_03 39:43

Do follow. I want people to think about what this means for people more widely. Get involved, understand, and let's have a more inclusive digital future.

Ralph 39:55

Amen. So with that, that brings the podcast to a close. So I just need to say goodbye and see you next time.

K 40:03

Bye. Bye y'all.

Tim 40:05

Now that was serious privacy. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. You can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Blue Sky at Sirius Privacy. Feel free to drop us a question or a comment. We'd love to hear from you.