I'm going to give you an answer that I want to say at the outset is not exhaustive, for all the obvious reasons, but a couple of things came to mind. The “BiblioTech” report was probably one of the most entertaining things the board's policy team has done. We deliberately collected everybody on our team, which at that point was, I believe, seven people, and locked them in a room for a couple of weeks, day after day, and said, “Let's think some of this through.”
One thing that's changed relative to the privacy work I was doing and the Ontario government was doing in 2001 and 2002 is, of course, that the premise of most privacy legislation around the world and data regulation is based on personal consent. A company can use this data to do whatever it does, as long as it's specific about what it's going to do with that data and as long as they obtain your consent.
Candidly, I think the rules around what is and isn't consent have evolved considerably, to a point where the market is very happy and very lax to say yes to a lot of requests for consent relative to what we expected in the early 2000s. Nevertheless, the principle of consent is still there if you're downloading an app that asks you if it can use your data, and you still have a choice to say no.
The problem with public realm data is twofold, which I think is particularly interesting for you as parliamentarians. First, it's public. You can try, but there's no reasonable way to get inferred consent, which was a big doctrinal discussion in 2001. Inferred consent is difficult to get unless you plaster a particular region with signage and so forth.
Two of the examples I usually give on this are city of Toronto cases, where there would be a public benefit to collecting the data that most voters would probably say yes to, but they're not really acting on what their sensors are picking up in terms of traffic cameras along the King Street pilot, on the one hand, and traffic cameras they're using to study traffic that could also be used to study accident sites and so forth, on the other, because they don't know what the rules are and—