Information & Ethics committee  Your colleague is going to Google it for you on her BlackBerry. But in the meantime, my understanding is as follows. When transmissions are sent over the Internet, those transmissions have two components: headers and payloads. The “header” is basic identifying information, and in this case it was the identifying information of the network itself that we were attempting to collect.

Information & Ethics committee  I should add to all of this that we've had a number of blog posts on this topic as well.

Information & Ethics committee  Excellent.

Information & Ethics committee  Right. I think that's consistent with my testimony.

Information & Ethics committee  We worked with the Privacy Commissioner on this very issue, and they were satisfied that posting information about where and when we would be driving, and making that available publicly and to the media, was a sufficient notification that would satisfy them that our obligations under privacy law would be met.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, members of the committee. Thank you very much for this opportunity to meet with you to discuss Street View and Google's mistaken collection of Wi-Fi payload data, and to answer your questions. My name is Jacob Glick. I'm Google's Canada policy counsel.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Canadian Heritage committee  What in particular are you thinking about?

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, we talked a little bit before about the Canadian notice-and-notice system. I think that strikes the right balance between user rights and free expression and trying to prevent infringement. You could also look at the Chilean judicial notice and takedown system. It differentiates itself from the U.S. notice and takedown system.

Canadian Heritage committee  Well, in a way, the Internet has been able to do what generations of parents and teachers could not do, which is to get kids to watch less TV.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think a lot of what's happening online is really exciting. It allows kids to engage in communities in what's sometimes called a lean-forward medium, instead of a lean-back medium; it's interactive, collaborative, and community based. Of course, nothing can replace going out and playing and hanging out with friends, so I'm not saying that anyone should spend all their time online or watching TV.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think it's important to prevent online the same things that are illegal and objectionable offline. We need to ensure that we have strong measures online to prevent piracy, child exploitation imagery, and hate speech and defamation, the things that in Canadian society generally are inappropriate or illegal content.

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. I have something else that goes to your point. You mentioned that you were an educator before being a parliamentarian. I think a really important point to make to parliamentarians and educators is on the importance of digital literacy in this environment. That is to say, for many years in schools as part of the curriculum, we taught kids how to watch TV in a smart way or how to read newspapers in a smart way, right?

Canadian Heritage committee  Okay. All right, then, they—

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. This is a great question, because it's one of the paradoxes of the online landscape. If you look at what Canadians are doing online, you'll see that Canadians are using these technologies in droves. Canadians are some of the biggest adopters of online technology in the world.