Thank you for a fascinating discussion.
Mr. Everson, I was a two-time board director of the Chamber of Commerce. At the time I was on the board, I was representing a small northern Ontario media company, and we were looking at the possibility of where we could move in terms of digital culture. I agree with you; I think the opportunities have exploded since, and even as we were watching it develop. I think Canadians are well positioned to take advantage of this. We have to encourage that. I think it's part of what our work at this committee is to do, to find out how we build the climate that allows that kind of innovation.
The issue here is about consumer confidence and the threat of data breach. Those are the issues I think we need to look at. When we ran our magazine, our database was our commodity. That was the value of our work. It's what allowed us to do value-added sales. We had many groups offer to buy this data from us, but it was an issue of trust with the people who purchased our products. They were our subscribers. We kept that.
If someone had wanted to breach that data, they would have actually had to break into the house, steal the computer, and then they would have gotten it. Now, however, in terms of what's online, it seems that when we have this discussion about informed consent, we're talking about an understanding of an old style of business model—you click on something, and it's about a commercial relationship or a sharing of information—but in the age of big data, it's a question of function creep. It's so easy to access data. You can access data through algorithms just casually. This is the concern.
My concern is about a breach of consumer confidence. For example, if I'm at a café and I use their WiFi, there's an agreement. I sign that yes, I'll abide by the rules. But we had the case with Google Street View going by. They were gathering WiFi hotspots, and that was a good business model for them. But there was the whole matter of load data that was collected as well, which could include e-mails, medical records.
I didn't sign on for that in giving initial informed consent. The people who gathered that data might not have even been looking for it, but the data is gathered up.
So, Mr. Everson, how do you see establishing some kind of framework to ensure that consumers have confidence, that the model is able to develop, and above all, that data breaches—because they would affect people's security—don't happen?