Fifteen years in the making.
Built for this moment.

The foundation of this practice was laid long before "data protection" became a compliance industry. Rishi Maharaj was involved in the drafting and final passage of the Data Protection Act of Trinidad and Tobago — not as an outside observer, but as a project lead within the public service. At the same time, he was contributing to the ITU HIPCAR Project, developing model legislation on freedom of information and data protection for the Caribbean region.

That work instilled something that still defines this practice: an understanding that data governance is fundamentally a question of power — who holds information, who controls it, and who is accountable when it is misused.

Before advising organisations, Rishi spent over a decade inside government — understanding how institutions actually work, how policy is made and unmade, and how the gap between what legislation says and what organisations do gets bridged in practice. His work included co-leading the design and implementation of TTConnect, one of the region's most ambitious e-government service delivery initiatives.

This background means we advise on governance with an understanding of what it actually looks like from the inside — the pressures, the constraints, and the moments where good intentions and poor systems produce real harm.

Privicy Advisory Services was formally established as the Caribbean data protection landscape began to accelerate. The practice was built to offer something the market was not providing: advisory grounded in Caribbean law, Caribbean institutional context, and Caribbean regulatory culture — not GDPR frameworks with a regional veneer applied on top.

Today the practice serves as External Group DPO to major financial and insurance conglomerates across multiple jurisdictions, advising boards on compliance architecture, breach management, regulatory engagement, and the governance of AI systems.

The rebrand to a public interest advisory practice reflects something that has become impossible to ignore: the challenges organisations face around data, AI, and accountability cannot be separated from each other. An AI system making decisions that affect people's access to credit, insurance, or public services is simultaneously a data protection issue, an AI governance issue, and a human rights issue.

The breadth of this practice — data protection, AI governance, ethics, transparency, and the political dimensions of digital systems — is not a feature of our branding. It reflects the actual shape of the problems our clients bring to us.