Information & Ethics committee  In just one word? No.

Information & Ethics committee  Rather than focusing on the ease of access, it's more about how relevant the information is to a specific individual and the sensitivity of the information. I say that, because it's relatively easy to get information about the location of thousands of people using the Queensway at rush hour to deliver traffic information; and it's relatively easy to analyze thousands of different voice patterns in order to feed a translation program that does it automatically on the fly on your device.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Saini brought up Globe24h. In practical terms, there are technical barriers to strip-mining information from these sites that, as you point out, are otherwise restricted from search engines, and then making that available online to be accessed through search engines. The barrier isn't really so much a process of the right to be forgotten as it is one of technical sophistication by those sites and those site managers to realize that their information is being strip-mined and placed on another site for public access.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  This is part of the reality in Europe, which is that while you may have the completion of the sentence and you may have some level of confidentiality imposed on the record, the reporting of the record still exists, both through the media themselves and other sources. Then, country by country, it may be a legal requirement or it may be a judgment call on whether or not there's a request, and it's followed through, to suppress the results of those still extant news reports about the crime.

Information & Ethics committee  Or it would be in the Canadian context. Part of the challenge is that this right has been created in lieu of having a serious civic conversation about when information should become opaque to users. If we have a requirement for administrative decisions to be made public in a specific context, the right to be forgotten tries to create an end run around that by obscuring that information again, rather than having a fulsome conversation around whether there should be a time limit on making that administrative judicial information public, and around whether bankruptcies should have an expiry date in terms of publicity as well as relevance to your credit record.

Information & Ethics committee  We already try to provide that information to our users, in the context of that recitation of websites that I mentioned in my account, where underneath that you can see a record of your location history, your search history. You can see how we've made decisions around what advertising you should see, based on broad categorizations that are based on the search behaviour and ads you click on within our properties.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, they're all considered corporate assets. There's an example of when we were a young company and all we had was a search product. Larry and Sergey, our founders, published a paper about the page-ranking system upon which the search product was based. Just the process of publishing that paper gave spammers who wanted to game the search rankings and get a higher ranking for their services enough information to start skewing the results.

Information & Ethics committee  I have three kids of my own, and I think a lot of the effort comes—

Information & Ethics committee  They've grown up with the Internet. They're ages 22, 21, and 17. The focus has always been on being aware of what your children are doing, whether inside the house or outside the house, on a device or with friends, or possibly with a group of new friends. That's where we focused some of our efforts: explaining what those interactions look like online and providing tools for parents.

Information & Ethics committee  Family Link is in a beta-tester program right now. It was just launched in the United States. I think it tries to address some of the concerns you have, that in the context of a young child, how does a parent have some level of awareness and control over what the child is doing with online tools?

Information & Ethics committee  There's a difficult question here, which is how exactly a company like Google or any other company would identify an individual to a level where they would then be certain to enforce those tiers. That's part of the challenge that COPPA presents, in that you don't want to create a record of someone who's under 13 years old, right?

Information & Ethics committee  The right to be forgotten, as it's identified and implemented in Europe, is problematic because it effectively creates an administrative role for Google, as a private sector corporation, in deciding what information users can and cannot see, but it doesn't remove that information from the Internet.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to appear today to speak to you on such an important subject. We, meaning Google and I, haven't had the opportunity to appear before this committee in quite a while, so I'd like to take a few brief moments to tell you about Google in Canada.

Transport committee  I hinted, in my remarks, at the idea of having to focus our experimentation and implementation on districts. This is going to hit at some of the major changes that you're imagining and I think we're all imagining. It's also a bit to Monsieur Aubin's point, which is that we need to get into a phase of implementation rather than experimentation, and that's going to require a really focused concentration on changes that are significant to communities.