Thanks very much.
My line of questioning, instead of following everybody else's, has to do with how we go forward.
At an international meeting, obviously people like the commissioner come together to consider what we do about this. Surely we have now learned something from this Google Street View episode. I was a bit shocked that just one engineer can decide that this is a “superficial” privacy concern and then go forward. It doesn't seem as though there's any training at all as to what privacy is. They're naming Alma Whitten as the new director of privacy; do we know who that person is, or whether she has any idea of privacy? Would the equivalent people in lots of other companies that are obviously pushing us forward in technology be at the privacy commissioners' meeting? Where do they find out what the minimum specifications actually are in terms of determining what a real privacy concern is, or a medium one, or a so-called superficial one? We're breaking new ground all the time, and I think that even in medicine we learned the hard way that the law has a terrible time keeping up with technology.
Do you have any observations as to what you would want us to put in a report from this committee about how we could go forward? Could it be that the commissioner needs powers more like those of some of her international counterparts? At the same time, the NHS is able to tell people where the closest smoking cessation course is, and that's probably a good thing, so how do we balance the need to help citizens get things that are relevant and responsive to their needs against their need for privacy?
I think this example was pretty egregious. Google all of a sudden was capturing all of this data without any pre-clearance or advance warning or respect. Somebody who knows more about privacy than a private enterprise would actually need to go forward the way we would, with a law and a charter challenge. We would want to know whether this would fly or not before you went ahead and collected all this stuff.
If you were writing the recommendations for this committee as to what we learned and how we can go forward in a more proactive way, what would those recommendations be? If you don't have them now, would you send them to the committee?