Information & Ethics committee  We don't have a lot of time, but if we go back many years to when we were doing statistics, normally we were designing experiments to make sure that our samples were representative so that at the end we would get statistically significant results. Now we're in a world where ther

Information & Ethics committee  It's too late to regulate data harvesting, because we can't go back in time. However, we can regulate the use of technology. What people don't always understand very clearly is that the idea driving the technologies we are talking about is acquiring lots of data and using it to

Information & Ethics committee  That would very likely be necessary. The crux of the matter is the stockpile of data. A glance at the numbers that show how the situation has evolved show that the quantity of data being stored in cloud platforms is exponential. Once the wheel starts to turn, it's difficult to t

Information & Ethics committee  It always comes back to the same question. To develop technologies like these, companies collected an enormous amount of data, presumably without the informed consent of the people providing it. It happened. It's a reality. That's what I was saying in a very pragmatic manner in m

Information & Ethics committee  Generally speaking, people don't consent to allow a company to use their information any way they want. For example, if someone feels that it's important to allow people to follow them on social media, they consent to make a picture of their face available solely for that purpose

Information & Ethics committee  The answer is yes, I do believe that's possible, if data collection is done without people's consent and without them properly understanding the purposes for which the information is being used. That in fact is what explains recent personal information protection legislation. Que

Information & Ethics committee  Of course, the matter of a balance is subjective. I don't know whether I expressed myself clearly. When I said that people made a lot of personal information publicly available, I was alluding to societal behaviour. It does not justify the use of such information for other purpos

Information & Ethics committee  Right. Generally speaking, I think people are in favour of using facial recognition technology for specific clearly-stated applications when it's easy to understand the benefits and how the data will be used. However, there are still enormous challenges to be met in building pu

Information & Ethics committee  Members of the committee, I'm delighted to be participating in this important study. I'll begin by briefly introducing myself. My name is Françoys Labonté, The Chief Executive Officer of the CRIM, the Computer Research Institute of Montréal. I have a technical background, a PhD