Evidence of meeting #59 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was bluekai.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Wetaskiwin, AB
It creates a standard platform that everybody can use and have access to.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Wetaskiwin, AB
That's good.
Getting back to the issue of privacy, what is it you're offering that sets you apart? It doesn't sound to me like you're offering anything terribly different from what's already available out there for any data aggregator, except you have this registry, this enhanced transparency, that allows people to see what's there. How is that new or different? What are you doing that sets the bar above or beyond what everybody else is doing in the marketplace?
Outside Counsel, Privacy Officer, BlueKai Inc.
My understanding is that there are fewer than 10 registries in the marketplace right now. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Outside Counsel, Privacy Officer, BlueKai Inc.
There may be more. Google has one. Yahoo has one. I believe Microsoft has one. There might be three or four other companies that have one. BlueKai has one. This level of transparency is not something that I would characterize as being common in the marketplace.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Wetaskiwin, AB
Is the ability of the user to directly engage in that registry what sets you apart?
Outside Counsel, Privacy Officer, BlueKai Inc.
We think that's an example of a privacy innovation.
December 11th, 2012 / 3:45 p.m.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Wetaskiwin, AB
I'm not coming after your organization. I understand the value of it. I totally get the freedom. People want to be free to do what they want to do on the Internet and have their say, but they are also concerned about their privacy.
Can you enlighten the committee on the technical capabilities that would allow users to visit a website they couldn't otherwise go to if they chose to turn their cookies off or if they chose not to sign on to a user licence agreement?
I've had some people before this committee say how difficult it would be to provide a platform that allows users preferences based on the level of security and the level of interaction with the company. I don't think that it would be all that difficult to do.
Do you think that would be an onerous thing to do? For example, instead of a one-button, select-all agreement to all the terms and conditions of an end-user licence agreement, could the industry have specific parts of that agreement agreed to and others not agreed to and still provide the user with the experience of visiting a website?
Outside Counsel, Privacy Officer, BlueKai Inc.
It's a really tough question. We don't provide any end-user licence agreements.
Outside Counsel, Privacy Officer, BlueKai Inc.
Other than BlueKai.com, we don't own or control any websites. Additional granularity in privacy statements would be a really helpful thing, as it would be in end-user licence agreements.
The layered privacy notice that Martin Abrams over at Hunton & Williams and a number of others have proferred over the years is a positive step forward, but there's a wrinkle: if you provide a summary at the very top of what your privacy practices are and then give the legalese below, a regulator might think the summary is out of harmony with the legalese. At least in the United States, there's potential to have a regulatory issue. That's one of the things that some companies find challenging.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Wetaskiwin, AB
Are you sure? We're having a great conversation here.
Thank you very much.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
Thank you.
Welcome.
Maybe you can just explain to me your platform and how it is anonymous. You have this information about a person, but it is still anonymous, and the advertisers are attracted to this anonymous information. Explain that to me. I am sort of losing what your model is there.
Outside Counsel, Privacy Officer, BlueKai Inc.
It's a pseudonymous model in which we know a certain profile corresponds with a particular browser. That browser may be used by one person. That browser may be used by multiple people. The computer may be used by multiple people. If you were to visit, say, a travel website, a cookie might be dropped onto your computer by BlueKai or another company. That cookie does not say, for example, Alan Chapell. That cookie just says, “interested in travel to Hawaii”. There is no way to identify the user based upon “travel to Hawaii”.
I imagine a vacation in Hawaii would look pretty good to many in this room right now .
Liberal
Outside Counsel, Privacy Officer, BlueKai Inc.
In some respects, it goes back to the basic tenets of direct marketing. If it's more likely that a particular ad is going to be more interesting to a particular browser, the advertiser is more willing to pay a website publisher for placement of that ad. That way, the targeted advertising actually funds a good deal of the content that consumers enjoy for free.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
You provide that browser information to the company that wants to do the advertising. Is that correct?
Outside Counsel, Privacy Officer, BlueKai Inc.
We provide a platform that enables those advertisers that advertise online to store that data and then analyze and utilize it to increase the intelligence of future digital media buys.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
Is there any way to link up the data you have with an individual offline? Is that possible? If the advertiser got the data, and then got it from somewhere else with the person's name attached, could the two be linked?
Outside Counsel, Privacy Officer, BlueKai Inc.
In these types of discussions, you want to separate what is theoretically possible in certain instances in a lab from what is practicable from a business standpoint. One need only look back a couple of years to, I think, America Online, which inadvertently released some search data. It was such a large file that a reporter was able to identify a number of individuals from a list that numbered, I think, in the millions. That was with a fair amount of work. Since then, I think the industry has taken additional steps to make it even more difficult to potentially identify a particular person. In technology, I suppose one can never say it's impossible, but in the case of BlueKai and the way our data systems are set up, I think we're very close.
