With publicly accessible information, there are problems with private databases, for which an access fee must be paid. A little earlier, Ms. Szurlej spoke about the fact that a fee has to be paid for access to some databases, particularly abroad. In the United States, for example, huge databases are accessible to the public.
For background checks, you can pay to get access to quite major databases. You can also pay to get into Twitter or Facebook. A little earlier, we were talking about Facebook and Google. They sell their data to the public. Anyone can buy the data. The identity of the purchaser makes no big difference for Google or Facebook.
Perhaps the procedures with data that are not public should be reviewed, to the extent that they are not published. There is also the question of the kinds of data. We are talking about general information, which is public. But the restrictions are on personal information.
In terms of the data that can be obtained, and that are not technically personal data, the differences are quite major. For example, data coming from Statistics Canada, from Google or from Facebook are not personal data in the eyes of the law. However, those data provide a lot of general information.
For example, those data could be used to design a deep learning algorithm or a neural network so that it can learn to determine people's sexual orientation or religion. However, at the end of the day, the algorithm contains no personal data. If you buy the algorithm, or access to it, are you buying personal data? Those are issues that have to be dealt with.
It is a very good thing to want to update the legislation in terms of databases and of current technology. However, in criminal law, we always try to use neutral language and present things in a neutral way from a technological perspective.
The legislation should be drafted in a way that can be applied to a “holodeck” or any other technology of the future, so that we do not have to update the legislation once more.
What does that mean for the algorithms and the technology? I am not an expert in the area, I am expert in legislation; but in my opinion, a number of questions need to be asked about what databases, and the various tools used by intelligence services, can represent.
Those are really different questions from those about what is or is not public, or about who can have access to what.