There was great enthusiasm in the 1970s and 1980s for the concept of the ombudsman and ombudsman powers. It was reason together, conciliate, moderate--all a great idea. You could argue that for the level of privacy issues we had in the 1980s, the Privacy Act was sufficient, but we're now in the World Wide Web in which you're using cell phones, and you're sending e-mails, and you have no idea where the information is. You have no idea where your data is being stored.
Growth in Facebook is exponential. I bring to your attention the case of somebody who informed her friends in England a week or two ago on Facebook that she was leaving her husband. He murdered her. There are risks of using even something like Facebook, and the various commissioners have done good work on that.
We all know, from the way our own lives have changed with the BlackBerry and computers and terminals and automation, how dramatic the change has been, and we don't even know some of the risks involved for our children, and things like that.
What I really would like to talk about sometime is health and the electronic health record. Once you build a big database of electronic health records without robust data protection and privacy and security in place, then you're really in trouble, because if there's a big database, somebody is browsing the database. We have lots of reports in the privacy community, from my successor in B.C., about people who just like to go into databases and abuse personal information. There has been lots of theft by the Mafia and gangs in Quebec from various databases of the government. That's another reason we have to have really good security, really good auditing. I want machines watching machines. We can do that if the will is there, but the public service has to be told to do it and make it work efficiently.