Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable members. My name is David Elder and I am a communications and privacy lawyer with Stikeman Elliott here in Ottawa. I also act as special digital privacy counsel to the Canadian Marketing Association, and it is in this

Information & Ethics committee  Is it an option to do neither of those?

Information & Ethics committee  I would argue that we've come somewhat close, I think, to option number two in terms of simplifying and codifying an approach. This is exactly what PIPEDA does, recognizing that technology is evolving very rapidly and the legislative process will always be behind. PIPEDA takes th

Information & Ethics committee  I'll jump in. Certainly, one of the most difficult things is getting this balance exactly right. As a former chief privacy officer, I can tell you that it's extremely frustrating. On the one hand, you'll have people saying that it's too short, that you didn't disclose this and

Information & Ethics committee  What they provide to marketers is access to the platforms. They'll say to the marketers, “We won't give this to you, but you tell us what kind of people you want to hit, for example, members of the ethics committee, and we'll do our best to direct your ads to those people.” A si

Information & Ethics committee  It shifts all the time, but we have somewhere over 800 members. I'm not sure how that comes out as an exact percentage of marketers and advertisers in Canada. I could certainly undertake to try to get you that figure, but my belief is it certainly represents a substantial majorit

Information & Ethics committee  In what context are we talking about? Are we talking about in social media?

Information & Ethics committee  Well, it depends on whether or not you are a social media platform or not. We've been talking about Facebook a lot. Obviously, Facebook has quite a bit of data and has all of your profile information. They have that information. I certainly don't speak for Facebook, but my unde

Information & Ethics committee  It's hard to generalize, but for the most part, that is true. Again, that's a big piece of what the business is for those companies. Once they hand over that detailed information to another party, putting aside the privacy issues involved in that, they've given away the store, in

Information & Ethics committee  I think that users have a number of means of control on the Internet. Some of those controls are featured in browser preferences. For example, you can set up browsers for various safe zones to reject or accept certain cookies and other types of information. When users are using t

Information & Ethics committee  There's a way now. We already have a situation where things can be investigated by the Privacy Commissioner. She can make a report of findings. She can decide, or the complainant can decide to bring that matter before the Federal Court. The Federal Court can issue any order, incl

Information & Ethics committee  Again, as I said earlier, I think when you give an ombudsman, an investigative body, the power to also order fines, that fundamentally changes the balance and you have someone become investigator, judge, and jury. That would be to the detriment of what for the most part is an ope

Information & Ethics committee  Are you talking about it in the context of a targeted advertising position?

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I think there are great benefits to interest-based advertising, as you suggest. It has certainly been explicitly acknowledged by the Privacy Commissioner. Much of the Internet is free to use, particularly the social media applications. There are some “freemium” options on

Information & Ethics committee  I haven't really given that a lot of thought or spoken to the CMA about it, so I won't put this forward as the CMA's position, but I would say generally that companies are in favour of the concept of transparency and so to the extent that a company is collecting, using, and selli