Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for inviting BlueKai to testify at this timely and important hearing. My name is Alan Chapell, and I am the outside counsel and privacy officer for BlueKai Incorporated, a digital data company with hea

Information & Ethics committee  We do have some business in Canada. It is not a large lion's share of the business that we currently do, but there is certainly some data collected on Canadians.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes: Omar Tawakol.

Information & Ethics committee  I think he is making the analogy that data can be very valuable. It can be very helpful to consumers. It can foster innovation. Our primary business is a data management platform, which really provides the plumbing for the oil pipeline, I guess, if we're going to extend the anal

Information & Ethics committee  I think we do a little bit of both. There is certainly an analytics and analysis component to the platform, and certainly the data exchange product does obtain consumer preference data.

Information & Ethics committee  The cookie is essential for a number of things online: certainly the ability to track, the ability to remember a particular browser on a particular page when it visits the next page in order to provide what they call “state”, so that there's some ability for a continuous user exp

Information & Ethics committee  It's certainly possible. What that would presume is that the same company was dropping cookies on the first site you visited, and then the same company was dropping cookies on the second site you visited, and the same company was dropping cookies on the third site you visited.

Information & Ethics committee  I think the data points can be congregated not necessarily into one continuous profile knowing that you've been on website X, website Y, and website Z, but if website X is a finance website, it's very possible that there may be an indication that the browser has visited a finance

Information & Ethics committee  My first answer would be that BlueKai doesn't engage in any type of profiling regarding alcohol usage, so it's important to make that clear.

Information & Ethics committee  There are a number of segments that we consider off limits.

Information & Ethics committee  It goes to a specific Internet browser—

Information & Ethics committee  —which may or may not relate to a specific individual, because computers are shared or Internet browsers are shared.

Information & Ethics committee  Most of the major browsers have offered some form of stealth for a couple of years. I think some of them call it “incognito”. I think each browser has its own nomenclature for it. Those have been in existence for a number of years. To the extent that it provides users with some c

Information & Ethics committee  I think that's a fair description.

Information & Ethics committee  I think that's correct, sir, with the caveat that BlueKai isn't using this data. We provide a platform that allows our advertising clients to utilize that data.