Information & Ethics committee  Certainly.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much for this invitation. To give you a bit of background on my organization, the Centre for Law and Democracy is an NGO based in Halifax that works to promote foundational rights for democracy. Most of our work is international, but it is a Canadian-based organi

Information & Ethics committee  Thanks very much. First of all, it's great that you found that work, “Travel Guide to the Digital World”. I completely agree that there's a big difference between information collection that happens in the private sector and information collection that happens in the public se

Information & Ethics committee  Just quickly, in terms of what public bodies should be doing, I'm not a data security expert. You have security people who will tell you the areas you need to improve. The main thing that I would say is data minimization. You can do what you can to try to make yourself as secur

Information & Ethics committee  First of all, while sharing information among the Five Eyes is not the same as handing that information over to Egypt or Saudi Arabia, I think that abuses do take place and have taken place within our Five Eyes partners. There's clear evidence of that. I'll particularly point t

Information & Ethics committee  I absolutely agree that there does need to be a balancing between those two, but this is not the only instance in which we balance rights against one another. We balance privacy against freedom of expression when talking about regulation of the media and what they should and shou

Information & Ethics committee  I would add that regular reviews are a good idea. I think five-year reviews have been among the recommendations for both the Information Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner. I think they are a great idea. You mentioned that it's been over 30 years, and there haven't been

Information & Ethics committee  I'll reiterate that we're not opposed to order-making power. We're on the fence about it, and to me it seems like an issue of efficacy more than anything else. I'm inclined to defer it to the Privacy Commissioner, if they think it will help them to do the job better. I don't th

Information & Ethics committee  This also parallels a recommendation that we made for the Information Commissioner. To me, it's about a gap in understanding among Canadians about what privacy is and about the changes that have occurred as a result of digitization, which have dramatically changed people's rela

Information & Ethics committee  That's going to be very tough to do in one minute.

Information & Ethics committee  What I will say is that situations like this need to be taken more seriously by the police, and the reason I phrased it the way I did is that I think that when threats are made against journalists, it is a threat to democracy, and I think that these need to be taken more seriousl

Information & Ethics committee  It depends on the platform. Twitter has traditionally taken a much lighter hand, and now they're engaging more heavily because of the pressure they've come under. Facebook has always engaged more heavily, but again, they're coming under pressure. They recently have faced some cri

Information & Ethics committee  Can I just add something?

Information & Ethics committee  In terms of collating different types of information, I just want to point out that there can be data sets that used by themselves are relatively innocuous, but when you combine them with another data set, the impact on privacy can be escalated dramatically, so the use does make

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, absolutely, it is a loophole that can be exploited, and it has been exploited. To give you a parallel example, which I think spells the issue out more clearly, you have the United States signing information surveillance agreements with Denmark. They signed an agreement with