Policy needed to find public data, uses: Official

SINCE Independence, information has never been shared because no one has been able to define what public data is, an official says.
Registrar-general of the Papua New Guinea Civil and Identity Registry (PNG CIR) Noel Mobiha said there was no way of knowing what was best for public consumption and what was for privileged use because there were no guidelines for the sharing of information.
Responding to questions raised during a seminar held at the National Research Institute (NRI) recently, Mobiha stated that the Department of Information and Communication Technology (Dict) was the right department to set the standards by which the public could follow.
“A person’s biometric (information) is his or her private information and the same goes for their personal information,” he said.
“This is where the Dict comes in, because there has to be a policy guideline on what is public data.
“The issue that a lot of people don’t understand about data is that a lot of you think it’s that easy to just share data openly.”