Information & Ethics committee It's an uphill battle. Consumer education takes quite a bit of time. It has to be ongoing. It has to be repeated. Unfortunately, every year we get a new batch of consumers, and they all have to learn everything from scratch. In this type of instance, we find that consumers freque
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee I think, again, that we are almost on the same page. It has to be an educational process. Consumers right now don't know what their rights are. They don't know they can complain. They don't know who to complain to. They don't know what can be done about something if their informa
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee Can the commissioner take on a two-pronged--
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee Absolutely. I think we can continue on the same path as far as the education goes, with the Privacy Commissioner doing that type of thing. I don't see a reason to take it from her area.
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee Thank you. We kind of got off on the education end of it. We don't believe that the act should be made less onerous. We think it should be made clearer, more precise, so that consumers do know their rights and what they can do, where they can go, what is allowed, what isn't all
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee My wording there wasn't specific. In those instances where people charge their cellphone bills, their gym memberships, those are contracts. They are ongoing contracts where they are being charged on an ongoing basis. As I said, once a year or once every eight months, airline tick
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee If you are doing a monthly charge, that would be an ongoing relationship. I don't think buying an airline ticket once a year could be considered an ongoing relationship.
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee If that is an automatic type of thing, a monthly charge, then I don't think it is unreasonable.
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee No, but I would think that when a customer cancels their contract, which they have signed for x amount of time where you were debiting their credit card, then you would have to purge the credit card.
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee I don't know if you need “one size fits all”, but we do need to limit what you can ask for. Does the phone company need your social insurance number?
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee So I don't know, but I can understand the impulse for that. Is there another way around it?
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee No, do they need it? This is where we have to go. What do they need? What is the minimum they need in order to conduct their business?
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee Yes, if you are going to a bank and you have investments and you have interest income, they would like your SIN number so that Revenue Canada can collect money from you.
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee I don't think we need to be that prescriptive, but I do believe we need some better guidelines.
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland
Information & Ethics committee We'd really like to see some guidelines around certainly saying you can only collect your social insurance number if it is absolutely required for Revenue Canada purposes. You cannot keep credit card numbers in your data banks for extended periods of time. Once you process a tran
February 15th, 2007Committee meeting
Margaret Anne Ireland