Information & Ethics committee  I'd like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. Further, I'm on parental leave now, and I would like to thank my family for giving me the time to speak here today. I hope my comments w

Information & Ethics committee  I have not spoken with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. There has been some contact with the Chief Electoral Officer. I understand there is an informal working group, but I wasn't able to attend the first meeting. Whenever I have the opportunity, I try to make myself avail

Information & Ethics committee  I spoke about principally three things that I thought the committee hadn't heard before. The scope of this matter is something that's been quite daunting for anybody in communication studies. It's as though everything is all in one basket all at once, and what are the million dif

Information & Ethics committee  I think one point is about clarifying the mandate of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and extending their enforcement powers to potentially have more effectiveness. I don't know if it would necessarily be new regulation or just clarifying what we have already. The Office of

Information & Ethics committee  I do want to caution that.... I think transparency is quite important. I think there also is a need to start talking about the limits of where you can advertise and how you can advertise. This is why I think the bill of rights is kind of interesting. You were starting to stipulat

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  I think, in principle, getting to your question, political parties can easily fit within our existing privacy law. If you're collecting information about their views at the door, then it seems to me—not being a privacy lawyer—that there's an informed consent. You're asking them f

Information & Ethics committee  If I understand correctly, the credibility of advertising is a real issue. That's where I've noted companies like Facebook and Google exiting from certain ad markets or restricting ad options for certain keywords, such as “cryptocurrency” and “opioid addiction treatment centre”.

Information & Ethics committee  I would add to that also, thinking about public broadcasting. I think that one of the ways that we're seeing this issue is that we think about information subsidies, or what's subsidizing the production of information, and I think there is a whole host of new information subsidie

Information & Ethics committee  I was just going to say that what is clear is that what's been exposed—and I think what Facebook has also admitted before this committee—is that they have been entrusted with a lot of personal information and data and they have not been discerning about who has access to that per

Information & Ethics committee  Well, part of the concern is that there was access provided without clear oversight on how they were going to use that data. This is one of the things that's creating a challenge for academic research too. Facebook and many other social media platforms have tightened up their API

Information & Ethics committee  Part of my research is historical. In the 1980s, the Claritas Corporation was using geodemographics and psycho-demographics. In one sense, I think that one of two things can be true. Psycho-demographics can either be something relatively new—the point when you encounter it in the

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. I think enforcement mechanism is quick. I think one of the challenges is how you develop tools during the election to combat some of these things. This is where I think a code of conduct would be important, because, if you think of parties, if all of a sudden one party is be

Information & Ethics committee  I also want to add widening our scope of online advertising. We've been mostly talking about programmatic advertising. This is when you loop in bots, sponsored content, and influencer marketing, which is all this grey area of promotional content that's taking place on social medi