Human rights activist Felicia Dujon has questioned the handling of the findings of the probe into whether the administering of the controversial Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) survey to hundreds of schoolchildren in October broke any data protection laws.She contended in an interview with Barbados TODAY that the Data Protection Department which conducted the probe should not have forwarded the report to the Ministry of Education which took ultimate responsibility for the minors being subjected to the offending questionnaire without parental consent.“Who is the one that’s going to be responsible for whatever [action is taken] unless the report says no harm has been done or no kind of breaches have been done?” questioned Dujon, who is leading efforts by a group of parents to sue the Government over the survey.
If more Barbadians considered the number of institutions and businesses who are in possession of detailed personal and sensitive information about us, they would take the matter of cyber-attacks more seriously.This week, we learned from officials of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), our primary health care institution, that it had been attacked by hackers, who succeeded in crippling some aspects of the hospital’s operations.If that was not bad enough, we later learned that the attack had also impacted operations of the Harrison Point Isolation Facility, which was established to care for the sickest patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.The attacks have not been limited to the public sector.
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on Monday made clear it is not trying to get controversial Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) into local schools through the back door.In fact, the Washington-based institution told Barbados TODAY on Monday that it “has no other agenda than to support youth development through the strengthening of public education policies and programmes” in this country.CSE, a curriculum-based process of teaching and learning about the cognitive, emotional, physical and social aspects of sexuality, has faced resistance in the United States and other Caribbean countries amid concern that it promotes sexual education in an unhealthy and disruptive manner.Questions were raised about the possibility of the IDB trying to slip CSE into the school curriculum after revelations that a survey administered without parental approval to first-formers in five secondary schools, as part of a Computer Science project the lending agency is administering, included ques