Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I was talking to my friend at Apple about how I bought my first Mac Plus in 1984 with a little 350k floppy disk, and I saw it as a revolutionary tool that was going to change the world for the better. I still think it has changed the world for the better, but we are seeing some really negative impacts.
Now that I'm aging myself, back in the eighties, imagine if Bell Telephone listened in on my phone. They would be charged. What if they said, “Hey, we're just listening in on your phone because we want to offer you some really nifty ideas, and we'll have a better way to serve you if we know what you're doing”? What if the post office read my mail before I got it, not because they were doing anything illegal but because there might be some really cool things that I might want to know and they would be able to help me? They would be charged.
Yet in the digital realm, we're now dealing with companies that are giving us all these nifty options. This was where my colleague Mr. Erskine-Smith was trying to get some straight answers.
I think that as legislators, we're really moving beyond this talk about consent. Consent has become meaningless if we are being spied on, if we're being watched and if our phone is tracking us. Consent is becoming a bogus term, because it's about claiming space in our lives that we have not given. If we had old school rules, you would not be able to listen in on our phones and not be able to track us without our rights, yet suddenly it's okay in the digital realm.
Mr. Davidson, I'm really interested in the work that Mozilla does.
Is it possible, do you think, for legislators to put some principled ground rules down about the privacy rights of citizens that will not completely destroy Silicon Valley and they will not all be going on welfare and the business model will still be able to succeed. Is it possible for us to put simple rules down?