Evidence of meeting #88 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was question.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
I'll get to my point why I'm asking. Let's say I'm Facebook, the company, and Facebook itself says, once you posted this information I copied it to my second server, which I own, and now I'll take it off my first server and put it on my second server, which has Frank Baylis was this person—not is, but was—and this is all the information still available.
How can I actually extract anything if we don't have some rights to remove that, without going through the point that it's accurate or not?
9:55 a.m.
Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
I don't have an exact answer, but I would not give extreme consideration to the right of the organization to the information in question. At the end of the day, it is the individual's information and PIPEDA is written to protect....
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
Frank Baylis Liberal Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC
Let's assume it's not the organization, but some really interested guy is collecting information on thousands of people and he's doing this. It's just a person. He's doing it and putting it up there because that's what he likes to do.
9:55 a.m.
Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
That's probably exactly what leads to profiles becoming inaccurate over time. This goes to individual control by individuals. If Daniel Therrien puts information on social media at a point in time, but I can delete and remove it because I no longer want it and it's my information, it should not be possible for others to scrape it off the internet, put it somewhere else and make it available say three, five, ten years later when I don't want that information to be out there. It's still my information. You cannot have control of the information if others can just, again, scrape it off the Internet.
9:55 a.m.
Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
We will have a crack at it. We can write to you on this question. These are not easy questions.
9:55 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Mr. Baylis, is that fine?
We said we were going to exhaust all the questions. Are there any further questions for Mr. Therrien?
Mr. Gourde.
9:55 a.m.
Conservative
Jacques Gourde Conservative Lévis—Lotbinière, QC
My question is in the same vein as the one put by Mr. Baylis.
In the House, we can debate a given topic for 10 or 15 minutes, but certain media can quote only the beginning of a sentence, the middle, or the end of another sentence that we may have said on another occasion. They put all of these bits together and create a whole new sentence. That sentence was never spoken in that way, but all of the words are there. Then it gets published on Facebook and reported on television or radio.
As members, do we have any recourse against that? Everything is recorded by the parliamentary network but the sentence in question was never spoken verbatim; it was edited.
10 a.m.
Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
I have not analyzed that question in detail, but I would say that your recourse would probably be to express yourselves as parliamentarians and public persons, and refute this practice by the media in question.
10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you.
As one who experienced that very thing in one of our national publications, where something that I didn't say was actually put in quote marks, I can relate to that exact problem.
Thank you, Mr. Therrien.
Ms. Vandenbeld.
10 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
I don't want to open up another can of worms, but going by Mr. Saini's question, what if the server where this person took that information is in another country, outside our jurisdiction? We know that on the Internet, things are posted internationally.
10 a.m.
Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
There are rules in PIPEDA regarding that law's jurisdiction and my office's jurisdiction over activities outside of Canada. There needs to be a sufficient link to commercial activities in Canada for PIPEDA to apply. In many cases, foreign companies have commercial activities that have an important link to Canadians. They offer services to Canadians, and that means that PIPEDA applies even though the company is outside Canada.
10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you again, Mr. Therrien. I'm sure we'll have you back at some point in the future.
10 a.m.
Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
Thank you.
10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
I'm going to suspend for five minutes until we can come back to consider the draft report.
[Proceedings continue in camera]