Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses today.
It's great to have two provincial commissioners here. There's certainly a lot of experience in your presentations.
I'm going to come at this from the perspective of one of those computer programmers who dealt and struggled with some of these issues in a life prior to becoming a member of Parliament.
Mr. Michael Geist was before our committee here a few days ago—and I think Mr. Angus was going down this road—but I'm deeply concerned, not only as a personal consumer and person who's making his way through the Internet these days but because I have young children at home whose situation I'm worried about. Of course, as a parliamentarian, I'm always worried about issues pertaining to the privacy of my constituents and so on. So this is quite a timely and interesting study that we're doing right now.
I agree wholeheartedly with the premise that defaults.... Mr. Geist's comments were that the “devil is in the defaults”. It would seem to me that some of the default settings that we have, whether they're at the operating system level, whether they're at the browser level or the interface level, whether they're at the data level, are somewhat concerning. I would just like to give both witnesses an opportunity to talk about that a little bit more.
I certainly do agree that—in your privacy by design presentation, item 2, “Privacy as the Default Setting”—is something that I think most Canadians, if they were given an opportunity to have this reasonably explained to them, would enjoy.
I also believe fully that I should be explicitly asked, as a consumer, if any of my personal information should be collected. It should not be written up in some 15-page legal document, where unwittingly, with the press of one little button, I must accept the entirety of a document. I have no ability to parse out and accept those parts that I do agree with and those parts that I disagree with, I must accept the entirety of signing on to an account, or whatever the case might be, in order to partake in whatever transaction that I'm doing.
I just wonder if there are some practices out there or some recommendations you have that would help consumers navigate through this ever-increasingly complicated web.