Thank you.
I think that a short and perhaps unsatisfactory answer is that what happens to the information is that it's sold, right? We know that. That is the business model of these organizations. That is why they went with the biggest IPO in history, which a lot of people are somehow taking pleasure in seeing flounder, I guess, depending on whether or not you've purchased stocks.
But it is sold. I'll give you an example from Twitter. Twitter sold I think the last two years of feeds to two marketing companies, which would then create that sort of segmentation based on products. So we have companies that are interested in mining the information. These are all kinds of tweets—personal and whatever—but they look for various products, issues, etc., and they use them to then target ads. We have to understand that as long as the service is free—on the face of it—that is how these businesses are going to justify to their investors that they will make money.
I have to say at the same time that, again, when you look at individual actions and ask people what their preference would be, in our research, only one in five Canadians would pay $1 a month to avoid the collection of personal information, and 30% would be willing to be paid $1 a month to get targeted ads. So there is a challenge here, and what I would say to you is that it's a challenge because there has been.... I don't want to be harsh on the commissioners. The commissioners are operating within the given model to the best extent they can, but there has been a regulatory failure to control this over the last years, at least since we've had PIPEDA and before the model code or at least the social media became a much stronger force in 2006-07.
It is not controlled. The question is, do we care enough about it that we want to control it and regulate it? To me, it's clear from the research—there's no way to mince words about it—that if you leave it up to individuals, they won't do much about it. But the same is true with any kind of action. If you ask me if I'm willing to pay $1 to have the police or the firefighters respond to my door faster than for somebody else, I would say no, I don't want to do that; I think they should do it as a public service.
So it all depends on the analogy you're using. It's very well possible that people just see the protection of their personal information as a right that Canadian governments, provincial or federal, should intervene on and protect, and not as something they should be paying out of their pocket to do.
Thank you.