Information & Ethics committee  It was a program written by a Google engineer, but I think it was based on an open-source program.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, the open-source software is publicly available and you could download it in your office later today. In terms of the specific code at issue that collected the payload data, that code was examined by third-party auditors, and their report is available on our blog. We've made that report, as I think I mentioned in my remarks, available to the commissioner as part of her investigation.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll just say thank you, Mr. Chair, for having me here today, and thank you to the members of the committee for your thoughtful questions.

Information & Ethics committee  Thanks very much for the questions. I'll answer them in reverse order, if you don't mind, just for the committee's benefit. We are looking for, literally, the top engineering minds in Canada, and we're attracting them because of what a quality place it is to work. Frankly, it is really hard for Google in general to find people, but as the Waterloo office goes on a global basis for Google, they've had particular success because of the top-quality education system we have and the top-quality engineering minds we have.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not a U.S. lawyer, so I wouldn't speculate.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not aware of anything, but again, this is going to be part of the process that we go through as soon as I leave this room and call--

Information & Ethics committee  Again, Mr. Chair, if we go through this process and determine that we can delete it asap, and that's what the commissioner wants, we'll go ahead and do that and we'll advise the committee that we've done that.

Information & Ethics committee  Right.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't see any inherent problem with that. It all depends on availability. In this case in particular, for example, the committee wanted to hear from Google on very short notice, and it was important to us to appear because we wanted to be able to answer your questions.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't know the names of all the companies globally or in Canada who do that, but there are certainly quite a number of companies operating in Canada, at least that I'm aware of. By the way, there's a way that this could be done through what's called crowd-sourced data. If you Google public Wi-Fi hotspots, one of the first sites you get is a map that people have created themselves, based on publicly available software that does I think something similar, which is that you open it up on your computer and you can drive around and create and upload it to a public database and you can make that available.

Information & Ethics committee  Again, it's an excellent question. The facial recognition technology we use is literally the most sophisticated in the world. We developed it precisely so we could protect people's privacy. It's funny, because you can go into Best Buy or Costco and get a camera that shows where all the faces are when you look in it, so you think this is trivial technology.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, rural areas across the country have been covered. I don't know about those areas in particular. As soon as I go home I'm going to see if--

Information & Ethics committee  --New Dundee and Elora and Elmira and St. Jacobs and Fergus, all those communities, are up there.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  To be clear, if they don't want to use Google Buzz, then they have no reason to be signed up for it, and there's a way in their settings to just turn it off and get rid of it. So if they don't want to use Google Buzz, there's an easy way to get rid of it, and if—