Information & Ethics committee  Well, I think it's a step backwards from what we now have in PIPEDA. First of all, the first word is “consumer”—the consumer privacy protection act—labelling us all as consumers. We are commodities, with our information to be commoditized. It provides a private right of action o

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, this is a feature that.... I've found that in a lot of organizations, the people who create the websites don't talk to the people in the privacy office, shall we say. It's the old story that we'll put in all of these wonderful tools that can collect information, and it's rea

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely. Our information is being sold, traded and bid on in real time. We don't know it and we can't say, no, don't do that, because we have no idea who is bidding on our information. We don't have a direct relationship with them. We have no recourse. Our information is gone.

Information & Ethics committee  I can give you a very quick example. The way companies now are fined, but not the individuals, is meaningless. By contrast, after the Enron scandal, 20 to 25 years ago, the United States passed the SOX legislation. The complete name is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. It said ver

Information & Ethics committee  At this point, I would say it's the EU, because of the GDPR and because, at the very last minute, they put the brakes on a piece of legislation that would have required, basically, encryption to be broken to facilitate the ability of the police to find the predators. The police d

Information & Ethics committee  I do. Thank you.

Information & Ethics committee  I would say they are self-interested, because they are for-profit organizations. They do what they have to in order to improve their bottom line and to provide the greatest return possible to their investors and shareholders.

Information & Ethics committee  I think there are some that are better. They do take a greater interest in individuals' privacy. I could name the Tor Project, Signal, and Proton. These are the three that come to mind. They're not particularly social media platforms, but they are certainly communications tools t

Information & Ethics committee  That's a very difficult one, because each one of them has its own interests at heart. They collect the information and provide advertisers with the opportunity to reach our eyeballs. I don't know that any of them is really interested in our privacy.

Information & Ethics committee  “Surveillance capitalism”, the term that Shoshana Zuboff coined, is a wonderful term. We could also call it “surveillance economy”, because nowadays much of our economy is based on surveillance in one way or another, whether we realize it or not. What can be done? Before a drug

Information & Ethics committee  I read some of the written record, yes.

Information & Ethics committee  No. Was it a complete, thorough, fulsome answer? I don't know, but from my experience—keeping in mind that I'm the president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada, that I've been a privacy adviser for about 30 years, and that I've been inside a lot of organizations and have

Information & Ethics committee  As lawmakers, one thing you could do is not enact Bill C-27, because that's not going to make it better; it's going to make it worse. What can we do? Is PIPEDA a comfort? No, it is not, because it's not sufficient, as Jennifer Stoddart said when she was in the final days of her

Information & Ethics committee  I think that ransomware, like so many problems we have online, is a reflection of society. It is the same type of crime that was committed before the Internet. The Internet is a tool that allows the perpetrators to commit these crimes in greater numbers, with greater efficiency a

Information & Ethics committee  I think it is pervasive. Also, in the last half-hour, it took me a few minutes to find the birthdays of all but three members of this committee. I wish you an advance “happy birthday” for next week.