Thanks very much.
First of all, it's great that you found that work, “Travel Guide to the Digital World”.
I completely agree that there's a big difference between information collection that happens in the private sector and information collection that happens in the public sector. Information collection by the public sector has a lot more potential for abuse and needs to be monitored much more carefully, partly because governments can get up to.... I work a lot in repressive countries, so I know governments can do much nastier things with private information, personal information, than private companies can. Governments have extraordinary levels of power, and the ability to misuse that information is much higher in the public sector than in the private sector. We take a much more wary approach when we talk about government collection of information.
You also noted the consent model. When you talk about consent, that's another issue. You can choose to delete your Facebook account and you can choose to delete your Gmail account, but you can't really choose to stop paying your taxes. You're a Canadian. You're in the system. It does also change the dynamic quite a bit.
I will also say that the consent model for collecting information in the private sector does need to be thought through very carefully, and I would argue that the current consent model is broken. Nobody reads their terms of service and nobody understands their terms of service. There's a bit of a vicious circle. The fact that nobody reads their terms of service means that the lawyers who draft these terms of service are incentivized to draft them in incredibly broad and vague ways in order to make sure they cover every imaginable use. There's no incentive for them to clarify the terms or to limit the actual uses in their terms of service, because they know that the users don't care. Then the fact that these terms of service are drafted in such a broad way makes it very difficult for people who want to read and understand them to actually get an understanding of what they mean. That, in turn, disincentivizes users from actually reading and engaging with them.
While I do agree that information collection in the public sector needs to be watched more carefully, I don't think that this consent-based model is necessarily the answer to the private sector doing whatever they want. Actually, I think that stronger and clearer rules around how private sectors use people's information are very badly needed. I think that the current model is not providing adequate safeguards.
I've seen estimates that if you were to read every terms of service document that you were presented with, it would take something like 200 hours out of your week. It's not practical for people to actually be their own safeguards on this issue.
Sorry. I realize I am straying a little from the question.