Thank you very much. I intend to take only a couple of minutes. I want to leave time for committee members to ask any questions they may have about this important topic.
Thank you for having me today virtually.
I think the deputy commissioner outlined a number of things very well. I will take just a minute to situate my role.
As the chief information officer of Canada, I am accountable for ensuring that we have clear rules and guidelines around the usage of Government of Canada devices. That's the purview through which I made the decision on TikTok.
When we're looking at making decisions around what acceptable use is in government devices, we balance a whole bunch of things, including things like privacy, what is acceptable use in business environments, and cost. All of these things go into deciding what we allow on devices.
Maybe just as a last comment, it would be my best advice that we continue to tighten our environment in terms of the use of Government of Canada devices. We have a fairly open environment, in which about 90% of Government of Canada devices allow downloads of whatever the user would like.
We have partitioned devices, some for business and some for personal use on one common device. From my experience in the private sector, that's not usual, so it would again be my advice, and the direction in which I've been moving the organization, to further tighten that environment so that we balance out the use of devices for government business and government business alone. In doing so, we are going to have a knock-on effect that I think is going to better protect the privacy of our information.
I look forward to your questions, and I will pass it back to you to allow as much time as possible for that.
Thank you.