Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to be here to speak to you today. I've worked with Michael for many years, so it's wonderful to be here with him to speak on these important issues.
What struck me in what you will be doing—I'm just going to read it out—is that your committee is to “undertake a study of digital government services, to understand how the government can improve services for Canadians while also protecting their privacy and security”.
That is so vitally important. That's how I want to address something which I created years ago and is called privacy by design, which is all about abandoning the zero-sum models of thinking that prevail in our society. Zero-sum just means that you can only have a positive gain in one area, security, always to the detriment of the other area, privacy, so that the two total to a sum of zero.
That either-or, win-lose model is so dated. What I would like you to embrace today is something called positive sum. Positive sum just means that you can have two positive gains in two areas at the same time. It's a win-win proposition.
It was started years ago. I did my Ph.D. at the U of T when the father of game theory, Anatol Rapoport, was there. We used to discuss this. I always remember saying, “Why do people embrace zero-sum?” I am the eternal optimist. I would much rather deliver multiple wins than an either-or compromise. He said, “It's simple, Ann. Zero-sum is the lazy way out, because it's much easier just to deliver one thing and disregard everything else.”
I want you to do more, and I think you want to. You want to deliver privacy and security as well as government improvements that can improve services to Canadians.
My privacy by design framework is predicated on proactively embedding much-needed privacy protective measures into the design of your operations and the design of your policies for whatever new services you want to develop and whatever you want to do in terms of data utility, but we do that along with privacy/security. It's a multiple-win model. It's privacy and data utility services to individuals. You can fill in the blanks, but it's “and” not “versus”. It's not one to the exclusion of the other. But how do you do both?
I know that I only have 10 minutes and I've probably used up five, so I'm going to keep the rest short.
In the privacy world, there's a key concept called data minimization. It's all about de-identifying data so that you can benefit from the value of the data to deliver much-needed services in other areas of interest to Canadians and individuals without forfeiting their privacy. When you de-identify personally identifiable data, both the direct and indirect identifiers, then you free the data, if you will, from the privacy restrictions, because privacy issues arise and end with the identifiability of the data. If the data are no longer personally identifiable, then there may be other issues related to the data, but they're not going to be privacy-related issues.
Data minimization and de-identification will drive this goal of having what I call multiple positive gains at the same time, making it a win-win proposition. I think it will make governments more efficient. You will be able to use the data that you have available and you will always be protecting citizens' personal information at the same time. That's absolutely critical.
I am happy to speak more. I can speak on this issue forever, but I want to be respectful of my time restrictions. I will gladly turn it over to you and answer any questions that you may have.