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.