That’s a Trinidad and Tobago colloquialism much like dirty laundry, but with it embedded in the street networks of information. Gigabytes, terabytes, or even bytes – it didn’t matter the amount of bytes, just the weight of the bytes.

A juicy tidbit of gossip didn’t need much. In fact, you could consider it decompressing in a different way each time it was re-told.

In a world built largely on trust, on integrity, the wrong information could ruin someone. The right information might get you elected to political office, for those with such aspirations.

Some say these were simpler times. Some think they were better times, when people would discuss what they read in a borrowed newspaper over some puncheon rum. I don’t know. It was different, and it’s hard to say progress has been made.

I write that after reading Mark Lyndersay’s, “TSTT’s dark night of the soul“.

TSTT’s data breach was shouted from the rooftops. On social media, people became more and more daring about showing the sorts of information available from the breach. To say that TSTT was not frank about the breach of their information security is an understatement.

There was outcry, enough that the TSTT CEO was replaced, but… it seemed like most people didn’t talk much about it. I’m not sure what replacing the CEO does anyway. That’s like changing the steering wheel when you have an oil leak.

There was no real reason for me to go outside and do anything today, but I wandered into a few places and talked to a few people. Some of them had heard about it but didn’t know what the breach had in it. One person hadn’t heard about the TSTT data breach while he worked across from a bMobile (subsidiary of TSTT) store.

Then I realized something. It wasn’t that it wasn’t written about, on television (I assume), on social media, and what have you. It was. It was there for people to find.

There’s the algorithm problem, where they might not normally watch technology related news, but someone along the way would probably have spoken to someone in person about it.

People just weren’t as interested as I had thought they would be. They have much lower expectations than myself about safeguarding of personal information. They didn’t see the threat of having their information compromised… or as someone pointed out today, “There’s just nothing I can do anyway”.

And oddly, that’s why Mark was writing about the Data Protection Act.

Meanwhile, TSTT customers have their business in the street.