Thank you, Commissioner Denham. Like you, we have order-making power, and we can order the cessation or the destruction of collections of personal information that have been collected contrary to the act.
I did that a few years ago with the Ottawa police, believe it or not. They had collected information that I ordered destroyed. I had the pleasure of meeting Vern White, who was then the police chief in Ottawa and is now Senator White.
So we do have, in terms of what comes under our jurisdiction, the ability to order the destruction of these collections. Then we can ask for third-party audits to ensure that the data has been destroyed, although I had no concerns with the Ottawa police doing so.
As Commissioner Denham mentioned, the right to be forgotten is extremely important. It features prominently in the new EU data protection regulation that has been drafted.
Also, it is becoming more and more important because of the limited control you have in online social media and other fora in terms of online access. Is it really being destroyed? Is it being deactivated? How long...? What assurances do you have?
I'm going to suggest to people that you have very few or virtually no assurances in terms of private sector information that exceeds, certainly, my jurisdiction, and that may exceed others' jurisdictions. Even our ability to audit is very difficult to do. It takes a lot of effort. What the FTC and other organizations are doing now is building in the need for independent third-party audit, so that if the destruction of records has been ordered or required, it can then be confirmed after the fact.
But I just want to point you to one thing, and I'll say this as my final comment. Over time, I think it's going to become increasingly more difficult if companies and governments don't follow privacy by design in terms of proactively offering privacy as the default feature. You're not going to be assured of privacy or a destruction of your records. It's going to be a free-for-all.
We've been working with the University of Toronto to develop a new concept called SmartData. If you go to our website, you'll see that we just had an international symposium on SmartData, which is the developing of virtual tools that will work for the data subject and will be your virtual agent online to protect your data and act on your behalf in a contextual way.
I'm not going to take any more of the committee's time, but I just wanted to point you to SmartData. You can go to it on our website or we can send you some information. Again, we're calling it the embodiment of privacy by design—to basically give consumers, the users, the tools that will enable them to also protect their own data.
Thank you.