Information & Ethics committee  There are a number of links between social media sites and data collectors. Nexopia, on the commercial half of their site, had relationships with marketers in which they claimed to have information on how teens thought and purchased, because of their data set. I'm quite sure that

Information & Ethics committee  I think there is a lot that is good in our act. It needs some tweaks. It's really a matter of having the Privacy Commissioner look into problem areas, because she's on it; she has the experts. She can be ahead of the curve and work with other privacy commissioners around the worl

Information & Ethics committee  That's right.

Information & Ethics committee  They were all on retention issues.

Information & Ethics committee  I believe one of them was a refusal to set up a retention schedule for new users. So it would say that you had to keep it for three years after you stopped being a user. One was offering a true delete button. There were two more that I'm afraid I'd have to take a look at my phone

Information & Ethics committee  No. At the moment, Nexopia will suspend an account so that you can't get into it, but it is still in existence in their servers.

Information & Ethics committee  There are not many companies that do true delete. My understanding is that you can go through Facebook for individual items and delete. But the question is whether they are truly deleted or not in backup of backup of backup. They say they are for most purposes. But you have to go

Information & Ethics committee  I think that's a very hard one for social networks, which are designed to solicit and then keep information. That's the way they run. I don't believe they've been designed from the ground up to easily delete information permanently and to guarantee, on an auditable basis, that it

Information & Ethics committee  At the moment, I think that's the reality for most social networks, because the pressure is to keep data and/or at least anonymize it so it can be used for other purposes and you don't lose the value of it.

Information & Ethics committee  The Privacy Commissioner said in her finding, especially for youth users, that a lot of the information was sensitive: which school you go to, what gender you are. They had a very long list of interests, and a lot of the interests are things like clubbing, partying, drinking, or

Information & Ethics committee  It's a choice, so it's been identified by that person. There are also a lot of free forums, so you can write your friends, just like on Facebook or anything else. I think a lot of the information is just sensitive through its context.

Information & Ethics committee  It's interesting to stay slightly on that one as well. We haven't heard much in the committee—I've been watching it—about de-identification of personal information. That's used as an equivalent in the act. You can either de-identify or delete. The research we've done in our pape

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, and it's a very attractive model for some commercial uses. You can aggregate or de-identify and then use the information for other purposes: monitoring who comes to your site, what they buy, telling advertisers and your customers, and tweaking your site so that it works righ

Information & Ethics committee  One of the things I mentioned in my presentation was that companies define personal information in terms of the uses they're going to put it to for their own company. While that might be fine, a standard statement of what personal information is, according to the law of the juris

Information & Ethics committee  Perhaps tweaking the act to say you have to state the act's own definition of personal information might be something you'd legislate. Otherwise, I think that would be something led by the Privacy Commissioner in a round table with stakeholders. It could be in the form of guideli