Information & Ethics Committee on May 31st, 2012

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

One of the problems with answering that question is the lack of transparency. I would like a lot more information about the business plan behind these sites—and certainly describing how the back engine works—and then I would feel more comfortable in responding.

What I can tell you is what we know about the front engine. There's a lot of research that tracks how people respond to media images around gender, for example. Perhaps the best explanation would be to look at some of the work coming out of our eGirls project, another research project I've been involved in. Young women are telling us that when they're on these sites, they're surrounded by particular images of very thin, highly sexualized young women who are identified primarily through a relationship with a male. For background for our work on that project, we started with an environmental scan. We looked at 1,500 public profiles on Facebook of girls who ostensibly live in the Ottawa area. Those were public profiles. We didn't look at private profiles.

Now, of those 1,500, every single one we looked at, with one outlier, reproduced that stereotypical image of gender: highly sexualized young women, with the pouty faces and the bikini shots, with all the talk being about the boyfriend.

Now, there aren't any quantitative studies indicating there's a causal relationship between marketing and behaviour like that. There's an assumption, certainly on the part of marketing companies, that the reason these marketing images are used is so that they can steer behaviour, which they appear to be quite successful at doing. What we do know from talking to young people who live in these environments is that these very stereotypical images get in the way. For the young women who embraced them and sought to emulate them, they were wistful, in the sense that, “Gee, I just can't do it that well. No matter how much I diet, I'll never be that skinny”. For the women who wanted to be someone else, they said they constantly had to negotiate with these images and push back against them. That's driven by the marketing message they're getting.

One of the things that's interesting about the trajectory of what's happened in Canada—and Michael is right that we used to be leaders in all sorts of areas—is how well we did with Canada's SchoolNet. We provided public spaces where kids could talk to each other, spaces that weren't commodified, that weren't commercialized. The federal government got out of that business shortly after PIPEDA was passed. By default, what we're seeing is a lot of organizations that have kids' best interests in mind are using corporate sites to do things.

For example, a lot of schools—and we did a lot of work on this with teachers recently—are telling us they use Google Docs. There's no acknowledgement that that information can even be collected and used and reshaped to manipulate the kids who use that particular platform. Frankly, I don't think my kids should doing their homework in a store, you know?

I think the way behavioural marketing and advertising actually works is that it doesn't look like advertising. So if you talk to kids and you ask them what Facebook is, they tell you it's a social network. It's not a social network; it's a research lab. It's designed to collect information about people so it can be used and marketed back to them.

It's highly effective. We have definitely seen shifts—certainly in my research—about the way that kids respond to these particular images. I'd point you to all the research coming out about body image problems, and the increased use of cutting. There are all sorts of consequences. In this regard, I was at a meeting in Edmonton recently, where a number of doctors and academics got together because we see this as a health issue.

[Charmaine Borg, NDP, Terrebonne—Blainville, QC]

Thank you. I am sorry; I do not have much time left and I want to ask you another question. But I do see the extent to which privatization is reducing the public space on the Internet. I find that very worrying.

Here is my last question, Ms. Scassa. You said that people are talking in terms of security and not talking specifically about personal information. In your view, how does that change the relationship between the Internet user and the social media companies?

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

You have about a minute to answer the question.

[Teresa Scassa]

I am not sure that I understand the question. Are you talking about security?

[Charmaine Borg, NDP, Terrebonne—Blainville, QC]

The discussion is all about security and cybercrime instead of being focused on personal information. I am asking what that semantic change would mean.

[Teresa Scassa]

Certainly there is a lot of concern about personal information being lost from companies of this kind and the repercussions that has on us, whether in terms of identity theft or of criminal activity on the Internet.

Legislation dealing with the protection of personal information is still based on personal information. I really feel that we are losing the meaning of that concept, of what personal information is. We recognize that it means a name, an address and other information that you might give to someone. But more and more, personal information is information about all our activities, about everything we do online, and even elsewhere.

Given that, I think that we have to focus on the entire body of personal information that we share with companies to a greater and greater extent. I don't know if that answers your question.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Ms. Borg, your time is up.

So Mr. Mayes now has the floor for five minutes.

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to the witnesses. I really appreciated your input here this afternoon.

Mr. Geist, you mentioned Canadian values. As to privacy, I see this as drawing a line in the sand. What privacy is to me could be different to others. There's consent, but is there a user-specific consent where I'm willing to go so far and no further, a consent that I have to define for myself? That's the challenge I see in putting regulations together. Where do you pick up those Canadian values? That term means different things to different people. Could you develop that a little bit for me?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

You're right that many people have different perspectives on some of these issues. I think there's some low-hanging fruit here. We could start by ensuring that there's respect for people's choices about consent and that there's adequate disclosure from the organizations collecting the information. It is important to have informed consent.

We need to move further along that chain. I think it's fair to say that at the moment Canadian law doesn't do a good enough job. We don't get the disclosure where there are security breaches with any sort of penalties. We don't have order-making power to ensure appropriate compliance. And we don't have penalties where there is insufficient compliance. At present if a company doesn't like what the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has said, they just tell them to go to court, that they're not going to abide by the decision. At the provincial level, we have commissioners with order-making power and the ability to enforce.

It's pretty tough to have faith in the Privacy Commissioner's ability to represent the public interest, to enforce the values that are broadly reflected within society. The commissioner has told you that she can't do her job—the legislation, which dates back more than a decade, doesn't give her adequate means of enforcement and organizations are increasingly willing to push back.

There is concern about the blurriness between federal and provincial jurisdiction. But in light of the securities regulation decision from the Supreme Court of Canada last December, I think we'll see that, absent some real changes in the law, if the federal commissioner tries to get aggressive about enforcing the rules, any company that doesn't like what the commissioner has done will say, “Go sue me.” They're going to tie it up in the courts for years. And there is a clear risk that the courts may say no, or find the law itself to be unconstitutional. I think if we did nothing more than try to ensure appropriate disclosure and adequate enforcement of consent, we'd be miles from where we are right now, given some of the shortcomings we see in the law.

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

That's an area I'm interested in—enforcement. It's like a barking dog chasing a car. Are you ever going to catch up to the technology and the ways it's used? That's a challenge.

Mrs. Scassa, will enforcement proceed on a complaint basis? How do you deal with these corporations and track them? The cost of having people do that is phenomenal. Is it only on a complaint basis that you can react to this? Could you give me some ideas on enforcement of the regulations that we manage to put together here?

[Dr. Teresa Scassa]

There currently is a complaints mechanism under PIPEDA, but there is also the possibility that the commissioner can conduct audits of the information practices of companies, and she has done so on a number of occasions. There are a number of different powers you can give to a commissioner, whether it would be audit-making powers or a complaints-based process, including the possibility of initiating a hearing or a process where there appears to be a problem, on her own initiative, for example.

There are a number of different ways in which you can do it that don't necessarily make it completely complaints-driven. There are problems with complaints-driven mechanisms, because they make you respond to the things that people are bringing forward and, as you mentioned, they may involve a significant cost burden. Certainly, the volume of complaints has increased over the years, so there are other ways in which the commissioner can be given powers to react.

We've talked already about the power to issue fines, for example, or to take extraordinary measures in specific cases. I think the menu of options is quite broad and there can be multiple options in any piece of legislation; there can be a range of different powers, depending on the circumstances and depending on the particular norm or concern.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Unfortunately, your time is up, Mr. Mayes.

Mr. Boulerice, you have five minutes.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to take a few moments to thank you for being here and also for the quality of your presentations and your answers. This is really a very interesting meeting. The subject is fascinating and your comments make it all the more relevant.

A number of years ago, I was struck, as many are, by George Orwell's novel 1984. In the novel, the all-powerful government takes on the form of Big Brother watching over people's lives. The picture you are painting gives us the impression that the government could actually be a Big Brother. When the Conservatives introduce a bill like Bill C-30, we get chills up our spines, and with good reason.

But my impression is that we have a whole lot of “Medium Brothers” in the form of large Internet companies. They are getting to know our lives, to watch us, to know what we like and do not like, what we buy and do not buy, what interests us and what does not. Then they can go into action.

Is it your impression that online social media have become a bunch of Big Brothers?

[Teresa Scassa]

Along with the George Orwell novel, you also hear the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report mentioned. In that movie, you see commercials changing according to the person watching. Yes, I think we are watched by companies more and more. But you also have to realize that the information they gather about our activities and habits, our location and our movements, is also available to the government.

For example, provisions in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act give companies the ability to share information without obtaining consent in connection with a lawsuit or an investigation by the authorities. That is becoming more and more frequent. My colleague Professor Geist mentioned it. We are watched by companies and the government has access to the same information. That really is worth taking into account.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you.

Does anyone else want to comment?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

Sure. I want to harken back to the very first caveat and that is to emphasize how important and valuable these services are.

I recognize the language around big brother and social media, but I have to say that the value that's associated with this for so many different purposes, from community to activism to culture to education, is very important in a way that if we started calling this big brother, it would clearly put a negative spin on it.

I do think Professor Scassa's point is absolutely crucial, and that's one of the reason I referenced it in my opening remarks. Ten years ago, the big fear among many in the privacy community was about countries like the United States creating these large, all-knowing databases. They went by terms like Echelon or Carnivore or Total Information Awareness, TIA. I don't think the government, to the best of our knowledge, was ever able to create that in the United States. But databases much like those have effectively been created by the private sector, as many of us have actively given up that information to those companies, who, in many instances, as I mentioned, have obtained real value out of it.

The danger we face is that the kinds of limits that we have in legislation, within the Privacy Act, for example, which might set limits on what government can do with the information it collects, have not been established in the same way for information collected by the private sector and then accessed by government. Effectively, it is a circumvention or an end-run around the very rules that government has imposed on itself, to allow law enforcement and others to collect from third parties and do with that information what they are legally or otherwise unable to collect or do.

[Alexandre Boulerice, NDP, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you; the clock is ticking.

I have nothing against social media. I love Facebook and Twitter. They let me keep up with the news incredibly well and to share videos, information, and people's photographs.

I would like to ask you a quick question about the business model. A few years ago, an executive of TV1, a private television channel in France, said that he was selling available human brain time to Coca-Cola. He meant that his job was to get viewers to watch commercials. It is just like buying a paper. You think that you are buying the articles, but you are not; you are selling yourself to the newspaper's advertisers.

Basically, we can use and love Facebook, Twitter and Google all we like, people have to realize that they are voluntarily giving their private information to a company that will subsequently turn around and sell that information to other companies that will model and target the advertising that will then be sent back to the people. Is that right?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

Well, I think absolutely. As far as we know, the business model for many of these companies—and I think that for many of them, they are evolving, shall we say—is to leverage the information, the social graph that they're able to accumulate, and add value to that for marketers or others. There's no question that that's the model. That isn't, in my view, bad per se. There is a lot of value that comes out of this environment.

The danger comes where we engage in, as I talked about earlier, things like social media misuse, or the collection of information that I think in many ways feels somewhat surreptitious, where people are unaware of what's taking place. They're being tracked in ways that aren't providing information in the way that we typically think of, such as entering a bunch of fields on a computer screen, or uploading some pictures and saying, “Here this is”. In fact, it's the other kinds of activities that are actively being tracked and used, in much the same way that you've just described.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Unfortunately, your time is up.

I now give the floor to Mr. Dreeshen, who has five minutes.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you so much for coming today.

I was watching a television ad just a short time ago in which someone had been able, with their cellphone, to look at the speech that was being presented by a coach as he was talking to his teammates. He talked about how great it was that he was able to just move that thing down to YouTube and bring it right into the school so they could cheer them on. But here I think of what you mentioned just a few moments ago about the misuse of social media. Obviously they looked at it from that perspective of saying, “Isn't this great?”, but I think you're taking a look at the other side of it as well.

I was a schoolteacher for many years. Thinking back to when I went to university, it was always nice to be able to get somebody else's notes, if you didn't make it to class or whatever. But here it's just a case of “Why don't you just tape what's going on?”, and you can send it to your friends. Then I started looking at the propriety of what is being produced by the instructor and all of these other types of things and the types of protection you have.

That may or may not be associated with the privacy issues we're speaking of today, but nevertheless, it's one of those kinds of things that people have to be aware of. This means that institutions have to start bringing up certain rules in schools, where they say that you're not going to be able to go on Facebook or you're not going to be able to bring your cellphones or anything else into the classroom.

Those are the kinds of things I see. So when we try to bring some policy and some thoughts together on this, I think your comments on that would be something that I'd appreciate.

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

As part of the young Canadians project, we talked to 10 key informant teachers across the country, so I actually have good data on this. They perceive it as a privacy issue, because when the walls of the classroom become transparent, you lose the ability to create a safe space where kids can make mistakes, explore, and learn, effectively. In addition, there are all sorts of problems that happen when kids surreptitiously take tapes of what is happening in the classroom and post them online. It changes the dynamic significantly.

Uniformly, the teachers we talked to all indicate that the solution was not to get rid of the technology. In fact, that has been our knee-jerk reaction—“Oh, we don't like this, so let's just shut it down”. Social networking and these types of tools can really deepen kids' education, and I have a report of incredible best practices to justify that.

However, what they told us is that the real problem is that the schools are taking this approach and they're banning things. If they do allow kids to go online, they place them under total surveillance. By doing that, they also place the teachers under surveillance. What that does is shut down the opportunity to be that caring adult beside the kid when they do run into trouble or when they say, “Hey, this looks like a kind of a wingy site”, and the teacher can go over and go, “Yes, that's a hate site”.

So those teachable moments where we can give kids true digital literacy skills are shut down by not embracing the technology. But at the same time, I would stress that it is a privacy issue.

[Dr. Michael Geist]

I see the use of these tools, particularly for education purposes, as having a tremendous amount of potential. For instance, this particular hearing is not only being viewed; I took a quick glance, and there are also people tweeting about it as they listen or watch it in real time. The classroom isn't just the classroom that we tend to think of at, say, the University of Ottawa. This is, in a sense, a classroom, where others have the opportunity to watch, to listen, to interact, and to engage.

So I think there are great opportunities there. One of the things the government ought to be thinking about in there is how we can better facilitate the use of these sorts of tools and technologies to bring the educational opportunities to as many people as possible.

For example, Bill C-11, the copyright bill, did some of those things, but at the same time, there are distance learning provisions in there that require, as you may know, teachers to destroy lessons that are used under that particular exception within 30 days. To me, that's a most unfortunate provision in there, one that I think actually shifts us in the wrong direction when we start talking about the way we use these tools in furtherance of ensuring better education, better educational opportunities, and, frankly, ensuring that more people have access to this, not less.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Ms. Scassa.

[Dr. Teresa Scassa]

I would agree with that. I think there is enormous potential for creativity, for dynamism, for reaching learners with different styles and different abilities, and for bringing information and resources to the classrooms. There is tremendous potential there.

What I see, and this is purely on an anecdotal basis as a parent, is not a lot of guidance coming from the schools, not a lot of information. My 10-year-old daughter brought home an acceptable computing use form that she had to sign before she could go to the computing lab. It had things on it like “I agree that I will not engage in copyright infringement”. I asked her if she understood what copyright infringement was or what activities would constitute that. She had no idea. There are plenty of adults who have absolutely no idea. Had anyone at the school talked to her about it? No.

There is just not a lot of dialogue. I think the role of government in those contexts, perhaps, as has been mentioned already, is to facilitate education, to provide more opportunities to community groups and other organizations to carry out these functions. There is a richness of opportunity, but I think there is also a paucity of information and education.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

As we have to discuss committee business a little later, I am going to give Mr. Angus and Ms. Davidson two and a half minutes each. If you ask shorter questions, we can get through this.

Mr. Angus, you have two and a half minutes.