I would start by saying that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is not the only organization to understand the importance of establishing a set of international privacy standards. There is no doubt about that, given the fact that the information flows all around the world.
In 2011, at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Mexico City, a resolution was adopted to create a working group on international cooperation in the enforcement of laws protecting privacy. The resolution is implemented by a working group co-chaired by our commissioner and her British counterpart.
The working group brings together a small number of privacy commissioners from around the world for the purpose of identifying barriers that can be addressed cooperatively and finding ways to overcome them to foster effective cooperation. The confidentiality rules are a tangible example. We are all bound by confidentiality rules. In order to work with other authorities, we need a protocol to protect the confidentiality of our investigations. We've now signed protocols with four countries, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland.
I will give you a real example of how we used that new power. We conducted the first international investigation with the Netherlands. Both we and our Dutch colleagues had concerns about WhatsApp, an American company that produces an application by the same name.
So we pooled our resources. They did the technological analysis and we did the legal analysis and handled the negotiations with the company. We conducted two coordinated investigations. In my view, the results were excellent, partly because the company was up against two agencies responsible for the protection of personal information, instead of just one.
In addition, we are building a very intensive network. We give many talks around the world, and we are contributing to the development of an international normative framework.
The commissioner was at the OECD, in Paris, to help develop, consolidate and update the OECD's guidelines. The same week, I was in Mexico, and I gave two talks to our Mexican counterparts and at the University of Mexico on the international dimension of protecting personal information.