Industry committee  A typical Internet service provider collects a great deal of information in the course of providing services. There's nothing in ECPA that prevents a telecommunications service provider or an ISP from disclosing that information that is already collected. What it does prohibit is

Industry committee  I'll add just a couple of very quick points just to reiterate that since the act applies only to commercial activities, law enforcement agencies aren't engaged in commercial activity, and therefore it doesn't affect the ability of law enforcement agencies to collect this informat

Industry committee  I'll be quite honest. It's very difficult to draw the line between legitimate businesses and illegitimate businesses, and it's very difficult to craft legislation that deals with that. Now, having said that, I think the provisions that allow people to send electronic messages if

Industry committee  Let me address the first part of the question about whether this hinders the ability of businesses to engage in legitimate marketing. In some ways, I think using electronic means of communication to do marketing is quite different from, say, direct mail. One obvious example is

Industry committee  Let me try to clarify. Clause 78 is designed to deal with using a computer program to collect e-mail addresses. If I were engaged in a lawsuit against you or any other individual, there would be any number of other mechanisms I would use to get the e-mail address or any other in

Industry committee  Again, I think I would refer to the fact that, in our view, that is written relatively narrowly. It refers to using a computer program to collect e-mail addresses. Again, if for some reason a law enforcement agency wants to collect 10,000 e-mail addresses from a telecommunication

Industry committee  Again, we don't think it's overly broad. In fairness, we really haven't had anyone come to us with specific examples of what it would prohibit, or of what is now permissible that would become prohibited under this legislation, so it's difficult for us to respond to that. Again, t

Industry committee  Let me first start with a sort of caveat. This is Industry Canada's bill, not the Office of the Privacy Commissioner's bill. We have an interest in a relatively narrow set of provisions in the bill. Our view is that it's not overly broad. On this issue of spam, one of the diffi

Information & Ethics committee  In addition to simply capturing the images, the other thing we're beginning to see is overlaying other information, whether it's demographic information about the average incomes of neighbourhoods, and images that are captured from space that are getting increasingly clear and ha

Information & Ethics committee  The easiest way, for example, to explain cloud computing is that the term “cloud” is really a metaphor for the Internet. Instead of information being stored on your own computer and you having to purchase the software to manage that information, you store information on a server

Information & Ethics committee  Let me take that. One of the reasons that Google doesn't trouble us as much as other types of surveillance is that their surveillance is at a certain point in time. If you allow Google to use the argument that it's a journalistic exercise, then it's perhaps a small step for a co

Information & Ethics committee  Well, if you're looking at children—

Information & Ethics committee  A potential harm would be if the images that are being captured are of young children or certain other types of vulnerable people. There's the potential harm of humiliation if the images are continually capturing, in certain cities, some people who are intoxicated for whatever re

Information & Ethics committee  Newspapers do have certain codes of standards. There are voluntary bodies to try to deal with those issues. Certainly in some cases there have been people who have successfully challenged that in the province of Quebec, where, admittedly, the law is different. But in the province

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, but there is a significant difference between what I may observe walking down the street in that very momentary glimpse and what is permanently captured in an image that can be seen not by a handful of people, but by thousands of people, or in fact by millions or tens of mil