There's little question. An example coming out of the EU is the cookies example. Every website that you have in Europe has a warning that pops up first.
I'm not sure anybody is more or less protected by this policy. It's burdensome for companies and it's burdensome for the consumers who, I would venture to guess, 99.99% of the time when visiting a website will click through and allow cookies to come through on the website so that they can get the information they're looking for.
Is this type of regulation really doing anything, then? We talked about whether anybody has ever spent the time to read through the privacy policies that you see posted on a website, or do you just click through very quickly so that you can get to what you need to get done? Consumers in this day and age are always just clicking through.
There's also a system of checks and balances built into privacy legislation. It is not in the best interest of a private sector company to abuse the personal information of their own customers or clients. You can talk to T.J. Maxx, you can talk to Home Depot, you can talk to Target about the implications of having a significant data breach. Those companies were the victims of a data breach, of hackers getting into their system and accessing the personal information of their customers. They're being victimized, and they're doubly victimized by it by having a number of consumers.... For the larger businesses, that's great; they'll survive. For a Canadian SME.... You'll lose half your customers. That's usually an end-of-life incident.
It is, then, in the best interests of the businesses when they're collecting the information.... You can see how valuable it is now. As we point out, it is the new oil. There's a very high level of value for it, and protecting and storing that information and being able to analyze it is in the best interest of these private sector entities.