Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just to be clear on the member's question, as I said in my opening statement, we don't want to have this data. If I have misunderstood the commissioner, then I apologize, and we're going to get on that. That's the answer.

Information & Ethics committee  They're based in California.

Information & Ethics committee  There's a long answer. The short answer is that I think she's going to be a more frequent flyer than she is today. So if she's not super elite already, she will be. But more to the point, Google has product development happening all over the world. Just 200 kilometres from here, in Montreal, we have some of the most talented engineers in the world working on products that aren't designed for Canada but for Google users globally.

Information & Ethics committee  Sure.

Information & Ethics committee  The product teams in Canada will have responsibility, in the same way that product teams throughout the world will have responsibility, for privacy. That is say, every single engineer, herself or himself, is responsible and accountable for the collection, use, and handling of data, and we're going to be deepening that.

Information & Ethics committee  What I described to you is a combination of both. So the answer is, we have always had privacy considerations be an important component of product design, and our products reflect them. This incident is an anomaly, but that's not to excuse it. I don't excuse it, and that's why we are building additional safeguards to try to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again.

Information & Ethics committee  She's been at Google for a number of years. I don't have her biography in front of me, but we can use Microsoft Bing later to search for it and get it. But I can tell you that her doctorate is in the area of computer science and security and that she has published numerous papers in computer science, security, and privacy.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not familiar enough with the particular rules around collection in Italy. I can tell you that on the question of notice and collection in Canada, I personally was—

Information & Ethics committee  We worked with the Privacy Commissioner to develop something that made sense under Canadian law and that she was comfortable with, and that we thought this committee and Canadians would be comfortable with, for notifying Canadians prior to collecting the data. As you rightly pointed out, all of our cars are clearly marked—and this is on a global basis—and they are visibly Google cars, and we have a website that we constantly update with information about where we're going to be collecting information.

Information & Ethics committee  The short answer is, once we take it down, it's down. But the longer answer to your question is.... What do people do when they don't have access to computers and therefore don't have the opportunity to take it down? Statistics show that sizeable numbers of Canadians are using this on a daily basis, not every Canadian obviously, but it's a very popular product, as I indicated in my opening statement.

Information & Ethics committee  We have a robust takedown procedure, which allows anybody to report a problem on any image they see. And if they see themselves, their houses, their kids, or their cars, they can request that Google take it down. We process those requests in English and French, typically within 24 hours.

Information & Ethics committee  I apologize in advance. I don't speak French. The translation said in charge of confidentiality, but I presume you mean in charge of privacy.

Information & Ethics committee  The short answer is that Dr. Whitten has taken responsibility to be our director of privacy. That means not only is she going to be in charge of leading engineering teams working on privacy issues, as she has done already at Google, but she also will have heightened responsibility within Google to coordinate engineering teams and product teams at the highest levels of management.

Information & Ethics committee  Sure. Thank you very much for that question. It's an important technical question. I should apologize before starting to answer it to say that by training I'm a political scientist and a lawyer. I happen to be a big nerd, so I think I will be able to answer your question as best I can.

Information & Ethics committee  Right. I use all the search engines, so you could Bing it, you could do Ask.com.