Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question. In the brief I submitted to the committee, there are a number of specific recommendations that I make throughout. I won't and can't go through all of them right now. However, the first one that I think is important for the committee to remember is tha

Information & Ethics committee  As I noted in the full brief I submitted to the committee, Telus and Babylon Health have been in situations in which the Alberta privacy commissioner found that simply agreeing to a privacy policy is insufficient and does not constitute consent. The Privacy Commissioner of Canad

Information & Ethics committee  Also, no information is currently available to make clear how data is safeguarded and—

Information & Ethics committee  Third, that government agencies be required to ensure that meaningful consent is obtained before individuals are included in anonymized datasets, that retention limits be placed on these datasets, that reidentification attempts be strictly prohibited, and that the Privacy Commiss

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much for the invitation to appear. My name is Christopher Parsons, and I'm a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. I appear before this committee in a professional capacity to represent my views, and my comm

Canada-China Relations committee  We certainly hope this will be something the government looks at.

Canada-China Relations committee  I believe what is important when looking at these platforms and systems is to appreciate that some people have greater or less great risks than others. Elected officials, in one case, might be concerned about the data that is being collected. However, in our research on TikTok we

Canada-China Relations committee  For some of them, we certainly do. As one example, I think we could compel Facebook and other companies to explain how they interact with perhaps Chinese companies as well as Canadian companies. In other cases, I believe we would have to work with our allies—the United States,

Canada-China Relations committee  I think we're seeing pieces of that in the United States and the European Union, but it isn't something I would say is an agreed-upon position by respective governments. It's a place where Canada can participate with our closest allies to make movement on this.

Canada-China Relations committee  I haven't looked specifically into that case. Certainly what we have seen in our research and analysis of other parties' research is that DNA information is incredibly sensitive. There is a concern, of course, when any highly sensitive data is moving to any country outside of Ca

Canada-China Relations committee  Yes, absolutely. The first concern is how that data will be used to affect the individuals themselves. It's collected under a certain set of terms. Will that set of terms be applied on an ongoing basis? The secondary concern is that while it does reveal information about the in

Canada-China Relations committee  It's a very good question. I can only speak in the commercial context, as I'm not sufficiently aware of how it's being handled in China. Generally, I think there should be strong requirements that delimit how information can be used, inclusive of no secondary uses can be used, o

Canada-China Relations committee  To the best of my knowledge, and based on open-source information, there has been a relatively minimal breach of Canadian organizations to date, although we are learning almost on a daily or weekly basis that the number of victims is going up. The current impact seems to be relat

Canada-China Relations committee  Encryption is one of the few things that can be relied upon to keep data safe. One of the things that the Citizen Lab has argued for repeatedly is the availability of what's called end-to-end encryption. It's encryption where a message is secured from your device, goes to someone

Canada-China Relations committee  I believe, and this is paralleled by the CSE, that what's required is to ensure that our networks have multiple vendors operating in them. That may mean that there's a combination of Samsung, Ericsson, Nokia and other vendors as appropriate. In order to assess them, again, I thi