I'll leave my comments to the Canadian situation. As you know, I have plenty of American colleagues who deal with the FTC and the other agencies on a daily basis.
In Canada we have the advantage that we have a national private sector privacy legislation, and we actually have national private sector privacy legislation that is comparable to, and is in fact complementary to, legislation in some particular provinces. What that has meant operationally for our company is that we have a consistent set of standards across the country, across all our product lines, that we know we have to meet. And we meet them on a daily basis.
We also know that we have a relationship with the privacy commissioner at the federal level and the provincial levels where we can speak to them if we have questions about the application of that legislation, and we can speak to them about what may be developing in terms of technology, even long before there's an actual product, so we can arrive at an understanding of what compromises and what sort of tools have to be made available to users in order to reflect the privacy legislation in Canada and the needs for data protection and security of the users. We've seen that this works.
You mentioned financial penalties. In my experience, we've seen companies, particularly in the online space, be the subject of investigations and reports by the Privacy Commissioner and then react very strongly and very quickly to resolve the concerns of the commissioner as identified.
There are many more cases where there are complaints and those issues are resolved in dialogue with the commissioner's office. The difficulty we would face moving to a regime such as is available in some countries in Europe is that the relationship becomes more cautious. If you are dealing with a data protection authority that has the ability to levy financial fines, there's a caution in how you engage in dialogue with that authority, both in terms of making sure that you've set limits very clearly and that you're very aware of the implications of that engagement.
I would say that we really have an advantage here in Canada, certainly compared with the United States, in having that consistent legislation across the country. We've seen 10 years of it being applied fairly well, with very few instances where companies have not responded to the reports delivered by the commissioner.