Information & Ethics committee  Is it a fair deal for the consumer whose data is being collected and tracked? That is something that the Germans' Bundeskartellamt is looking at. They're investigating Facebook for, not so much the data that Facebook collects when you're on Facebook, but when you're then going t

Information & Ethics committee  In the past 10 years we've had a natural experiment in relying on market forces. The belief was that if we leave it to the free market, the free market forces will allocate data and privacy in ways that promote our needs. The problem—even with the market fundamentalists—is that w

Information & Ethics committee  Right now there really is no way to.... There are instances where data is valued and where data is bought and sold. There, you can ask what the market value of that data is and how it's used, but often there is no sort of market value for that data. It's hard, because you don't k

Information & Ethics committee  It's true that we don't know that much. In fact, I'll bring this out for you. Facebook did a study. It was called the emotional contagion study. It altered its algorithm, so that it gave some users more positive news and other users more negative news. They wanted to see what im

Information & Ethics committee  One important thing is that privacy is only one component. There's also market power. Even if you have GDPR, you're not necessarily going to address all the risks involving these data-opolies. That's number one. Number two, to follow up on Bianca, is that there is some uncertain

Information & Ethics committee  I believe Canada could currently prosecute a price-fixing cartel in the United States that was harming Canadian citizens. Under that logic then, if there are anti-competitive harms that are affecting citizens of your jurisdiction, you could reach out, just as the United States, I

Information & Ethics committee  One of the things that Google, among others, has argued is that data is non-rivalrous. Basically what that means is that other people can use data and it doesn't really devalue the data itself. Google has argued that this is why it doesn't have any market power. I think that's n

Information & Ethics committee  I'm unfamiliar with that provision, so I can't speak directly on that point. More generally, the point is well taken that if these companies have very little to fear in terms of liability, their incentives then can be askew. To Bianca's point earlier, there was discussion about a

Information & Ethics committee  Exactly. Here you have consumers whose data was being used and they could never envision I think Cambridge Analytica. I think it's telling, because if you've had companies come to you and say, look, we're going to promise greater transparency and the like, but they're not going t

Information & Ethics committee  One thing is that there is not a simple answer. The way I look at it, you can look at ex post, after-the-fact measures, such as increased antitrust enforcement. That would be one thing.

Information & Ethics committee  That would be one. Right now, looking at the Canadian competition officials as well as the U.S. competition officials, there's very much a price-centric focus on mergers, so it's improving, then, their tools for non-price effects, including data-driven mergers. One way would be

Information & Ethics committee  Let's start off with privacy protection. There's a perception that consumers aren't concerned about their privacy, but if you look at the data, it actually shows that consumers are resigned about privacy. They want greater privacy protection—this goes across age groups, not neces

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much. I recently co-authored two books on the data-driven economy. The first, with Allen P. Grunes, is Big Data and Competition Policy, and the second, with Ariel Ezrachi, is Virtual Competition. In both books we discuss some of the benefits of a data-driven econo