Because of the ongoing investigation and our legal obligations, the most important of which is not to draw any conclusions before completing this investigation, I would like to qualify your remarks slightly.
The conclusions you attribute to me would be more a function of what we generally see, as representatives of a regulatory agency, with the behaviour of all companies and the legislation that applies to them. Every day, we see that privacy policies are very permissive in that they allow for a very broad use of information, which is not always consistent with informed consent.
Can we say that Facebook violated privacy based on the facts alleged? We will certainly be looking into it. Our investigation is ongoing and we cannot draw conclusions yet. I can tell you what issues we will be looking into, but we are not going to talk about any conclusions in this case.
In general, we will be asking ourselves whether the two companies we are investigating, Facebook and Aggregate IQ, have violated the federal privacy legislation and, in the case of British Columbia, the provincial legislation.
More specifically, we will be examining whether Facebook's privacy policies actually were too permissive and whether they played a role in the subsequent use of the information by analytics firms to give advice that may or may not have been useful to political parties, among other things.
We will also be trying to determine, as I said earlier, whether the recommendations made by the Office before I arrived in 2009 are still applicable in 2018.
Finally, we will be looking at the role played by Aggregate IQ in all this and how the company collected the information. Was it done in accordance with the legislation? We will mainly consider the type of data analysis that was done. Did the final product, as communicated to the political parties, comply with privacy protection laws?
All those questions are relevant, and we will examine them. Obviously, I cannot draw any conclusions right now.