Good afternoon, Mr. Therrien.
Let me put something to you; I would like to know your opinion.
I am not criticizing the work we have done at all. I have thought for a long time that the committee has been doing valuable, excellent work. However, I want to suggest to you another way of looking at things.
We have been studying the protection of personal data for six or eight months. But I feel that we are spinning our wheels and getting nowhere, because we have not managed to define the problem we are trying to fix, by which I mean defining what personal information is. Let me explain.
People panic at the idea that a licence plate can be read, pretending that it is private. But all that plate can do is identify the vehicle on which it is mounted, not the person at the wheel. In the same way, an IP address does not reveal the identity of the person at the computer keyboard, just where the computer is located.
People gladly provide a lot of personal information. For example, you may remember when, in the first video clubs, we did not hesitate to provide our driving license numbers so that we could rent movies.
The reason why I feel that we do not want to touch the problem of defining personal information is that most of the witnesses we have heard from for almost a year have replied that the best way to protect our personal information was not through technology, but through transparency. Companies understand that people are ready to give them almost any personal information but, in return, they have to commit to telling them what they are going to do with it. So that means that the range of the data that you are ready to provide to anyone at all is not defined. As a result, if we are not able to define the problem that we want to fix, it will be difficult to define the measures that we want to take. Why not just simply stop right there and prevent any data transactions? If someone wants to conduct such a transaction, they would have to communicate with you to find out how to manage the information that is being communicated. That is the first part of my question.