Information & Ethics committee  We certainly understand the concern, having a footprint in Asia, in both China and Australia. We have firewalled all of our different operations. We limit access by employees who have access to servers or to systems, or who do maintenance on servers and systems by region as well, because we're sensitive to all of those concerns.

Information & Ethics committee  The business in Canada is just a telephone directory service. As I said in my opening remarks, it includes public listings, so anyone who's not listed or available through directory assistance would not be found in those directories. Consumers can choose to get out of them. We have the same directory service in the U.S., and we find consumers who don't mind being in a printed telephone directory, but are uncomfortable being in an Internet directory.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm only generally aware of it. I have not been following the details.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't really think we do in Canada, and I think that's because of the limited products we offer in Canada. In the U.S. we have products that identify heavy users of social media and what types of social media, such as Twitter or Facebook, an individual might use, but we do not offer those kinds of products in Canada.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Consumers who want to have their telephone directory listing removed may have it removed from the directories we sell for the search engines or they may have it removed from all of the directory products, things that are used for direct-marketing purposes rather than just directory search engines.

Information & Ethics committee  It's for the Canadian directories. That's correct.

Information & Ethics committee  The telephone directories have been our offering in Canada for over a decade. We don't have any plans to expand that. The market is not a large market for us, so our focus has been elsewhere.

Information & Ethics committee  No, we do not sell to individuals, we sell only to qualified businesses. We carefully screen all of our clients before we sell any products to them to make sure that they are a legitimate business and that they have a legitimate name for the data they're specifically requesting.

Information & Ethics committee  We have a very strong commitment to security, not so much for our data business, but for our services business. We host and provide marketing services to a lot of regulated industries, such as financial services and health care. As a result of that, those industries audit our security practices regularly.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, there are certain industries that by law are barred from targeting by race or ethnicity. Financial services happens to be one of those. But for other industries, particularly consumer product industries—for example, cosmetics, which are developed specifically for some ethnicities—there's actually a consumer benefit to target.

Information & Ethics committee  We only have Canadian data from the telephone directories I described in my opening remarks. The 500 million names represent our worldwide consumption. Acxiom has offices in Europe, the U.S., Latin America, and Asia.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know that we're the biggest, but we are one of them, certainly in the U.S.

Information & Ethics committee  In the U.S., not in Canada, we collect data from all of those sources, except for browsing data. We do not collect cookie data that tracks the browser history of individuals.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. Chairman Dusseault, Vice-Chairman Andrews, Vice-Chairwoman Davidson, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to share Acxiom's perspective. Also, thank you for the opportunity to do it via video conference. First, let me say that, as a global company, protecting privacy has been a priority for Acxiom for decades especially in countries unlike Canada where the laws do not cover all of the uses of personal data.