When I was in Saskatchewan earlier this year for a round table meeting with the ministers of agriculture out there about other matters, we got into a discussion about data. The ownership of and access to that data are an emerging issue. There are a couple of models that are flowing out. There's what I would call the private sector model and a co-operative model.
The report I referred to, which I'll share with the committee via the clerk, speaks to who will own that relationship in the future. One of the things this report speaks to is that it may very well be that there's a new entrant. If you take a look at whether its Uber in the car-sharing economy or Amazon in the retail economy, it may very well be that there's a new entrant in that whole data field, because there's an extraordinary amount of data that's going to be generated. As I said, a combine generates five gigabytes today. In the future, it's exponential.
In terms of the role the federal government can play, there are certainly provisions under PIPEDA that protect the privacy interests of the owners of the data. That already exists. I'm not sure what other provisions may be required of the federal government, but it's something we all need to keep an eye on because it's huge.