Information & Ethics committee  I'll distinguish two things. I heard you say—or perhaps I misunderstood—that there's a question of knowledge or awareness by Canadians, and a question of protection. As to whether the data of Canadians was adequately protected, that is the subject of our investigation, so I'm not

Information & Ethics committee  Is it for the social good, or for legitimate commercial interests, on one hand? On the other hand, does it violate privacy as a human right? Does it constitute surveillance? You balance these things out, and you determine whether the use of data is adequate in that fashion.

Information & Ethics committee  We can answer in writing, but I think that Mr. [Technical difficulty—Editor]. He would also be well placed. Otherwise, we would be happy to answer in writing.

Information & Ethics committee  What we have seen in the pandemic in particular is that governments, not only the Government of Canada but governments writ large, call on the private sector to develop digital programs in order to deliver services. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but what we see is that ther

Information & Ethics committee  If we're dealing with personal information collected by the federal government, the Privacy Act does offer some protections. It's a badly outdated law, about 40 years old, but it would be an exaggeration to say that there are no protections.

Information & Ethics committee  Is your question about COVID Alert?

Information & Ethics committee  We were heavily consulted on COVID Alert, and I was able to say that the privacy protections for that particular application were actually quite high.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. On the one hand, they must exercise their consent and, on the other, they must place their trust in someone else.

Information & Ethics committee  Obviously, that would be people who want to innovate with as few limitations or restrictions as possible, like the idea that de-identified information would not be subject to privacy protection.

Information & Ethics committee  On the question of proactive verifications, I'll say this. The idea is not to be a thorn in the side of governments or companies that want to innovate responsibly. The point is that data flows are so complex and business models are so complex that individual Canadians are not wel

Information & Ethics committee  I would not go to the motivation of a company. I would go to what safeguards we're applying.

Information & Ethics committee  That is what we would investigate.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Turcotte, you may want to answer this one.

Information & Ethics committee  I think this is the case generally, that people do not have an awareness or a consciousness of the many ways in which their data is used. Hopefully a cellphone user would know that their data is collected by Telus and maybe by a few companies around Telus, but they would not know

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, and the government introduced legislation in the previous Parliament precisely to improve Canadians' confidence in how their data was being used.