I think you did. I can say, having taken a number of university-level business law courses myself, that one of the first things you learn is that terms in law do not necessarily mean what they mean in everyday life. This is why, when you actually sit down and read one of the privacy statements or one of the statements you're signing off on, if you actually read them, you may have a lot more questions if you've taken a couple of law courses than you do if you haven't.
I can tell you, having read them, that I'm not entirely clear on what some of the subsections are getting at. I will ask that of companies when they come in, because I don't think it's your place to answer that. But I do think there is a role for clear language in working with the public, especially when we're talking about children or young people who might be using social media.
To the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, I agree with you that research is very important, but again it comes back to an issue of informed consent. I respect that you're saying you don't sell anything and don't advertise anything. But you're giving all your research to people who do sell things and advertise things—that's who the customers are—and they're looking to use your research.
It's very important research, because one of the things that retailers are looking for today is how to reach a customer. And it's not just retailers, but others. How do you get a message to somebody in an era when we're not sure they're watching television, not sure they're listening to local radio, or reading local newspapers. They might be doing all of those things; they might be doing it online.... So the research you're doing is very important.
But it comes back to this question, and this is my concern. There's all kinds of medical research we could do that could be very important. We could in fact look at the medical records of every member of Parliament to determine whether running 16 hours a day and eating whatever is put in front of you is good for your liver. I suspect it's not. But you'd have to have their consent to look at those issues and to look at their medical records, to see whether it is okay.
If you just looked at the medical records and came back with helpful information, it might be good that you have the information, but the way you received that information in order to process it might be entirely wrong. This is the issue with respect to informed consent. If you're researching things from social media and are producing good data from it but are doing so in a fashion whereby a lot of folks....
If you had a focus group and you sat down with folks and said, “Did you understand that it meant this, this, and this?”, I expect most people in the room would say “Yes, I knew that”, because people aren't about to tell you that they had no idea what the legalese meant and they don't want to seem, for whatever reason, incapable of understanding it. They're probably going to answer affirmatively, if you just ask them if they understood that this is what they were signing on to. But I'm not confident that people always do understand the implications of what they're signing off on.
Would you support a move toward more common language and clarifications with respect to privacy and then abide by it? It sounds as though you're very keen on abiding by all of the privacy guidelines of social media. Do you see that there is an opportunity for people to be confused about people providing consent that they don't mean to be providing, and that there's a role for this committee in working to clarify it?