Information & Ethics committee  Yes, absolutely. I'll quickly say a couple of things. Companies need to collect personal information to conduct their business; that's normal. When they share that information with other entities, they would create non-identifiable datasets. Ensuring that this is done properly,

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. I've been developing privacy-enhancing technologies for the better part of 20 years and deploying them through software and other mechanisms globally.

Information & Ethics committee  In general, the GDPR in Europe is considered to be one of the strictest regulations for protecting individual privacy. I think the commissioner referred to that as well in his responses.

Information & Ethics committee  That's a very good question. The regulation itself defines some general parameters, and the regulators have been developing opinions and guidance to operationalize the principles and the concepts around that. Also, there is the concept of codes of practice, which I think can be v

Information & Ethics committee  Purpose limitation, I think, is an important principle, and limits on data retention are also important. There are different ways to operationalize that. One way to achieve the limited retention is to anonymize or de-identify the data after a certain period of time so it's no l

Information & Ethics committee  Which committee are you referring to?

Information & Ethics committee  I was referring to the committee presentations from last week with the Minister of Health.

Information & Ethics committee  I think the key points are that we know how to do this quite well. The methods, the technologies, existed with this quite well. We need to make sure that organizations that are reusing data for legitimate purposes and for socially beneficial purposes are using and adopting these

Information & Ethics committee  Ontario has de-identification standards. The Ontario privacy commissioner has published such standards, for example our guideline. These are good guidelines. They reflect good practices today. It's always necessary to update these on a regular basis, but I think having a national

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, as long as you're also able to demonstrate that you have followed those standards, either through external audits or through some other mechanism.... Demonstrating it is important.

Information & Ethics committee  I can only share with you what's known publicly. Telus's “data for good” program has won a privacy award this year from the International Association of Privacy Professionals, which is a highly respected association for privacy professionals globally. That's one indication that t

Information & Ethics committee  I wouldn't be able to give you that answer because I haven't looked at the data and haven't done that analysis, but I think that's the objective of the OPC's investigation.

Information & Ethics committee  The information that was presented in terms of public health surveillance is typical for the kind of information that would be used by other public health agencies for that purpose.

Information & Ethics committee  If the objective was to do public health surveillance at a national level and if the data was distributed to have appropriate coverage, then yes, this would be a dataset useful for that purpose.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, it's public health surveillance to understand the transmission patterns of COVID in this particular case.