I'm a professor, so you know that I'll say fund more research. The Privacy Commissioner does some already, but could a lot more. I want to give you another concept.
I did a sabbatical once with a company called Northern Telecom. My project was to find new features for their phones. I came up with one that was a solution to the telemarketer problem. They were always interrupting my dinner. I said I should be able to put on my phone a dollar amount. Maybe I'm lonely, so it's zero or 10¢, but maybe I'm having a wonderful romantic dinner so it's $1,500 to interrupt me. If you wanted to pay that, you would be charged that amount. Nortel didn't build a function, but I do it. When somebody calls up, I tell them, “This is costing you $100 an hour; I take Visa or MasterCard.”
What's the relation to this? People need to value their privacy. You're worth something like $800 a year to Google if you use Google, Gmail, YouTube, and so on. There's no way to pay Google for that. Their services are free, but they're selling you. There's this whole concept of surveillance capitalism. Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard professor, talks about that. There's an economic aspect. Maybe what we need to do is tell people that if they think their privacy is worth something, there should be a way for them to get paid for it, just like taking the telemarketer call. Maybe you do want to give your information to the insurance company because you want that discount. Just know that you're doing it. The law has to make it really clear in some way how companies will disclose what you're paying.