Information & Ethics committee  A big part of our complaint was saying that it might be reasonable for an adult at 24 to make the choice to put that sort of sensitive information into a public area, but often teens don't have the maturity to understand that it's going to be available either outside the site, in the case of Nexopia, or even within the site.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll just keep saying it: yes.

Information & Ethics committee  I think some websites of some commercial parties do a better job than others do. Google tries and tries. They're so big and complex I think they almost can't, by definition, make it clear. But we do find that when the sites try to write from the user perspective rather than from their business perspective, it comes out a lot clearer.

Information & Ethics committee  There are a number of links between social media sites and data collectors. Nexopia, on the commercial half of their site, had relationships with marketers in which they claimed to have information on how teens thought and purchased, because of their data set. I'm quite sure that Facebook is using that.

Information & Ethics committee  I think there is a lot that is good in our act. It needs some tweaks. It's really a matter of having the Privacy Commissioner look into problem areas, because she's on it; she has the experts. She can be ahead of the curve and work with other privacy commissioners around the world to get on the hot spots.

Information & Ethics committee  No. At the moment, Nexopia will suspend an account so that you can't get into it, but it is still in existence in their servers.

Information & Ethics committee  That's right.

Information & Ethics committee  They were all on retention issues.

Information & Ethics committee  I believe one of them was a refusal to set up a retention schedule for new users. So it would say that you had to keep it for three years after you stopped being a user. One was offering a true delete button. There were two more that I'm afraid I'd have to take a look at my phone to find for you, but I could probably do that.

Information & Ethics committee  There are not many companies that do true delete. My understanding is that you can go through Facebook for individual items and delete. But the question is whether they are truly deleted or not in backup of backup of backup. They say they are for most purposes. But you have to go item by item; you can't delete a whole profile easily.

Information & Ethics committee  I think that's a very hard one for social networks, which are designed to solicit and then keep information. That's the way they run. I don't believe they've been designed from the ground up to easily delete information permanently and to guarantee, on an auditable basis, that it's been done, whereas a hospital or something else that has a more robust data-handling information services background might be able to do that.

Information & Ethics committee  At the moment, I think that's the reality for most social networks, because the pressure is to keep data and/or at least anonymize it so it can be used for other purposes and you don't lose the value of it.

Information & Ethics committee  The Privacy Commissioner said in her finding, especially for youth users, that a lot of the information was sensitive: which school you go to, what gender you are. They had a very long list of interests, and a lot of the interests are things like clubbing, partying, drinking, or things that might be something they don't want parents or other adults to see.

Information & Ethics committee  It's a choice, so it's been identified by that person. There are also a lot of free forums, so you can write your friends, just like on Facebook or anything else. I think a lot of the information is just sensitive through its context.

Information & Ethics committee  It's interesting to stay slightly on that one as well. We haven't heard much in the committee—I've been watching it—about de-identification of personal information. That's used as an equivalent in the act. You can either de-identify or delete. The research we've done in our paper tends to suggest some things never totally de-identify.