In terms of the ABCs of Fraud group that we were working on with consumers, in its evolution I got to see all of the information that had been prepared. It went right from the little skits they had done 10 years ago that were very vaudevillian, that were telling people about somebody telephoning with a granny scam and things like this.
The evolution has been very sophisticated, and that has been one of the difficulties: Who do you protect? There are our most vulnerable seniors, who are still paper-based to a great extent; the more sophisticated seniors, like me, who use the computer for all of our banking, e-mail, and everything; and the youngest members of our society, who now have cellphones and are texting back and forth at the speed of light. The evolution of your identity is as fast as light right now, and the people who I think are most vulnerable with this are the kids. I see their use of technology and the appreciation of that communication, the constant ongoing communication, as being very, very dangerous.
My grandson is 12 years old. He called because he wanted to buy something new online that was $3.24. I went and looked at this, and I said, “Wow, you have a lot of information there on yourself.” A 12-year-old is now far more sophisticated in giving out information than would be someone who's perhaps 60. The level and the evolution of that depends on the age group we're looking at. I think the most vulnerable now are the youth, in both the sexuality identity and the use of their faces on sexual images.
Your identity is a vast conglomeration now. It isn't just giving out your SIN, PIN, or driver's licence number. It can be something that becomes one of the animes. You've gone into a game and you've created an identity. That identity now becomes something that is very real in cyberspace—saleable, trackable, and minable. These identity things go from paper-based, which is still being used, to very sophisticated gaming technologies to Bitcoin and the use of technologies that are worth billions of dollars.
It's a difficult question, but I would say that this is evolving as we speak. As I said, this morning's mail brought to me a retailer, obviously, who has put together a research project that wants to mine data on children. In terms of identity, the use of our information is what we're now talking about, and the value of it. This is where the billions of dollars come from. It isn't just I, Janet; it's what I mean to someone somewhere else who can use that information to create a product and perhaps undermine a government. This is very sophisticated.