Information & Ethics committee  Let me tell you that you shouldn't feel too bad about yourself in that way. I recently was trying to articulate exactly how the defaults work on Facebook. I have talked about this for two years straight. I have students who live and breathe and consume the sugar of Facebook every

Information & Ethics committee  But you don't do that because you are irresponsible. You do that because you know it's on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, and if you're using Facebook you're clicking “I agree”. If you're not using Facebook and you're a university student at a law school, you no longer have access t

Information & Ethics committee  I'm happy to start. I'm not sure if the question was directed to me.

Information & Ethics committee  So as a former employee of Oracle, I guess you're particularly sensitive—

Information & Ethics committee  I see. In any event, you will be sensitive to the famous saying by Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, in the early 2000s, shortly after 9/11, that you don't have to give up any privacy; all you have to do is give up your illusions of privacy.

Information & Ethics committee  He was trying to sell to the United States a database so that they could implement a national identification card using biometrics, which he would then manage. So in that context alone, and in others, I'm very sympathetic to the concerns you raise. You draw correctly an importan

Information & Ethics committee  That's right. Storage is infinitely cheap. So it makes more sense, from a business proposition, to.... I take the same approach with my computer—

Information & Ethics committee  It's difficult to be put on the spot to answer that question, but I speak with some of the people who work with them all the time. I think one of the questions you would do well to ask is the one Madame Borg asked me previously to try to get a better sense of what exactly happens

Information & Ethics committee  It's a great question. My short answer to that is no, but I want to start by saying that it is the current model. The current model with PIPEDA, as with legislation worldwide, going back to the OECD guidelines on data protection in border flows, has been based on this notion of

Information & Ethics committee  Right. Well, you've made the perfect case for why we need greater enforcement powers for our Privacy Commissioner, because there will be instances when companies are set up in different jurisdictions that don't have the same requirements we do. But if we believe that there are

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I think there's a risk of that—there absolutely is—which is why we have to avoid creating these kinds of ham-fisted approaches you're talking about. What I'm talking about is really taking the principles we've already subscribed to, which are subscribed to all around the wor

Information & Ethics committee  Shall I begin?

Information & Ethics committee  Professor Levin probably has more expertise on this than I do, but I think the important thing.... I used the phrase, when I made my submission, about there being both a front end and a back end. In terms of answering your question on where this information goes, I would first w

Information & Ethics committee  Good afternoon. Almost exactly one year ago I was sitting in a boardroom much like this one, only much, much fancier. The daylong meeting was at 1601 South California Avenue in Palo Alto, California. If the address isn't familiar to you, it's the Facebook campus. A guy called Ma