Information & Ethics committee  We have been actively participating in any consultations that the government has been holding on how best to improve our privacy legislation, so I will leave it at that.

Information & Ethics committee  I've heard about the RFP. I don't have any comments on it.

Information & Ethics committee  It's with a lot of guardrails and supervision, yes. The idea is to support evidence-based decisions.

Information & Ethics committee  In terms of specific frameworks, as I said earlier, we did work with experts from across the country as well as even outside the country to look at the best strategies and techniques for strong de-identification. There are a number of different strategies to approach de-identification.

Information & Ethics committee  I think that's a really interesting question. It's a great question, because the analogy might be to say that there are 3,000 people who signed the petition to support a particular MP, and the MP makes the conclusion that 3,000 people in the country support him or her. That conclusion is the type of insight we're talking about.

Information & Ethics committee  I can take that away.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely. I can take that back and discuss how to present that to you with my team.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question. Prior to launching Data for Good, as I indicated earlier, we designed our five commitments around the sharing of data and protecting privacy. We were trying to anticipate what our customers would be most concerned about if they were to hear about this and we were trying to address those concerns.

Information & Ethics committee  It's very important to reiterate that these were not actual data sets that were provided to PHAC. We're talking about heat maps and derived data, so there were—

Information & Ethics committee  They were given permission to use it in accordance with the purposes of containing COVID. We were aware that they would be sharing it more broadly, sharing it wherever it could be used to serve that particular purpose, which was the containment of COVID-19 and to help fight the pandemic.

Information & Ethics committee  In the context of de-identified information, the focus should be on the actual core privacy protections. I think Bill C-11 started down this path that we can do more things with de-identified data, and perhaps the space it had for codes of practice would be a great place to put some of the standards we were just talking about.

Information & Ethics committee  There are some great aspects to the GDPR, and certainly we see in it that they have embraced privacy by design, and that's part of what we believe in as well. We've been embracing the privacy by design concept for a long time at Telus. I think there are some terrific aspects of the GDPR.

Information & Ethics committee  Do I think there could be tweaks? Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Before we start looking at something like a text message, I think there are a lot of considerations that would go into that type of thing. What we tell our customers all the time is to please not respond to a text message from us that you are not expecting, because it could very well be phishing.

Information & Ethics committee  That's a challenging question without knowing what the changes would be. I do want to make one thing clear, and it is that we have gone above and beyond the law. A lot of the things that we have been doing in our strong de-identification methodology, including our rigorous reviews of the purposes for which this data is used, the transparency on our website and the transparency specifically around Data for Good, are the types of things that would likely be in the new legislation.