Special Committee on Information Privacy in the Private Sector

2000 Legislative Session: 4th Session, 36th Parliament
SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON INFORMATION PRIVACY IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR
MINUTES AND HANSARD

MINUTES

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
INFORMATION PRIVACY IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR

Monday, June 5, 2000
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Birch Committee Room
Parliament Buildings, Victoria

Present: R. Kasper, MLA (Chair); J. Weisbeck MLA (Deputy Chair); P. Calendino, MLA; S. Orcherton, MLA; G. Plant, MLA; G. Abbott, MLA

Unavoidably Absent: G. Clark, MLA; G. Janssen, MLA; E. Walsh, MLA; K. Whittred, MLA

1. The Chair called the Committee to order at 3:30 p.m.

2. The Committee received a report from Mr. Geoff Plant, MLA and Ms. Wynne MacAlpine, Committee Researcher, as a result of their attendance at two conferences entitled “The Internet and Governance” and “Internet and Society 2000: Changing our Lives”.

3. The Committee adjourned at 4:40 p.m. at the call of the Chair.

Rick Kasper, MLA
Chair

Craig James
Clerk of Committees and
Clerk Assistant

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE
ON INFORMATION PRIVACY
IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR

MONDAY, JUNE 5, 2000

Issue No. 9

R. Kasper (Chair): I would like to call the committee to order, the Special Committee on Information Privacy in the Private Sector. We have an agenda that's been presented to all members. The first item is our report from our two conference attendees, Geoff Plant and Wynne MacAlpine. Geoff, you're first up, and you can give us an overview as to what you experienced there. It's your forum.

G. Plant: Sure. Thanks, Rick. I'll follow this outline that I've handed out here, and Wynne can fill in the gaps. I'm not going to pretend to try and summarize everything we heard. This is more impressionistic.

There was actually. . . . I'm used to legal education conferences where everyone has to publish papers. You take home a binder that allows you to say to your friends: "Here, look at all the interesting things I heard." The binder that we got is just mainly filled with the names of the people who attended the conference, the speakers and the advertising of the sponsors.

But there's a whole lot of stuff on the Net. I will give you, Mr. Chairman, two hard copies of newspapers that were published every day, entitled harvard.net.news. The Internet web site address of this newspaper is on the inside of the first page. It actually comprises a very good journalistic record of pretty well everything. But there are a couple of examples of what it looked like when it was printed out.

R. Kasper (Chair): Geoff, if I may ask, would you please read out that address so that we have it on the Hansard record?

G. Plant: It's www.news.harvard.edu/net news2000. There are no spaces between any of that. If you go to www.news.harvard.edu, you will probably find links that will eventually get you to the conference and the stuff that's there.

I also tried something interesting. . . . One of the closing keynote speakers that we were not able to attend, because we left on Friday morning, is the chairman of Intel, Andy Grove. Yesterday morning I went to Intel's web site, which is easy to find -- intel.com -- and not surprisingly, there's a whole bunch of pages dedicated to Andy Grove. I'm sure it's only a matter of a week or so before his speech gets posted there. Probably most of the people who spoke will. . . . You could probably find something that they've said somewhere on the Net, having all gone digital as we now have.

This was a very broad-ranging conference -- the Internet and society. I've just made some notes here of the various areas, I suppose, where the conference panels and the speakers talked about the impact of the Internet. One of the things that I am learning in general terms is to distinguish between the Internet and electronic communication. E-mail, of course, is the device through which we personalize the Internet. That is, we go on the Internet in order to communicate with people by e-mail.

But the distinction between the Internet per se and e-mail is also, broadly speaking, the distinction between information and communication. And one of the things that is a recurring theme of people who are considering the Internet as a part of their business or who try to study what the Internet means is trying to understand the difference or the significance between, on the one hand, making a whole ton of more information available to people -- which is really how the Internet works -- versus the change in communication, which is not entirely but quite significantly a function of e-mail. And that distinction is something that I try to bear in mind when I'm thinking about these issues.

Some people say that we're seeing here the thin edge of the wedge, a world of competitive pricing -- not just competitive pricing in the traditional sense, where we go downtown and check out the six stores that sell refrigerators to decide which is the cheapest one, and not just the sense of now we can go on the Internet to use a search engine to help us find the least expensive refrigerator in town. But rather, the people who sell refrigerators will start to pitch to us on the basis that they will offer us the cheapest refrigerator in town. And because they will know what town we're in and what neighbourhood we are in, they will know how low to pitch in order to succeed in getting our custom. So you can imagine, to use Vancouver as an example, that the good folk in Shaughnessy might be having a different relationship with the Amazon.coms of this world than the folks in Port Moody or somewhere else.

The second aspect of the economy is that all of this technology is going to change the way in which people do business. And now I'm talking about the structure of businesses. The first point is this phrase "disintermediation," which I guess is a fancy way of describing the end of the

Another thing that we heard about was the way in which the Internet is probably helping to create a new form of business structure that is less hierarchical. To give you an example of what that might mean. . . . Instead of a traditional business situation where only senior management have access to the most important information around the company and what it does and how it's doing, everybody in the company will get access to that information. We even heard about one business model where the company is so determined to be non-hierarchical that, even though they now have many hundreds of employees, they do not allow a branch plant or a branch office to open anywhere higher than the seventh floor of a building. They don't want people in the business to get high and mighty, thinking that they're fighting for the corner office on the fortieth floor. And every time one of their units reaches 125 people, they spawn off a new unit, because they don't want to be so large that they can't respond flexibly to the demands made by their customer base. So those are some of the aspects of the way in which people do business that I think are going to change.

Impact on society as a whole. I've listed in my outline three examples of web companies, dot-com companies, whose principals came to speak to us at various times. MaMaMedia.com is a kids' toy site -- an interactive site where kids can go on the site and play games and write things and draw pictures and exchange messages with other kids. BET.com is the Internet manifestation of a huge and growing company called Black Entertainment Television. Here we have the idea of web sites designed to appeal to African Americans.

One interesting example that was given to us by the person who is the CEO of iVillage.com. . . . I may not have got this exactly right, but the point will be illustrative. She was thinking, I think, about adopting a kid -- over the age. . . . She turned 40. I think she was thinking of adopting a kid. All of her friends told her that this was going to change her life: "You don't want to adopt a kid. You're over 40. You're early middle-age. You're too set in your ways. I've known you all your life. This is a really bad thing."

So she went out, using some of the discussion groups that iVillage.com creates, and began looking for people who, at that age in their life, had thought about adoption. She found the support group scattered all over the world -- mainly all over the United States. They were people who had had the experience of adopting and eventually told her enough that she decided it was the right thing to do. That's the idea of virtual community.

Well, imagine what happens when you take those ideas and go to the next subject, which is geography. We were talking about dissolving traditional geographic borders for all kinds of things. The impact that's going to have on how we're governed is something, I think, that people at this conference were entranced by. But there is really very little in the way of concrete response or vision about what this is all going to mean.

Another point I wanted to make under this heading is that growth in the use of the Internet to date has been largely American, as has been the growth in dot-coms and all the people who are providing services on the Internet. The next phase is the internationalization of Internet access. On the Tuesday at the government conference we certainly heard a bit about what that is going to mean -- that tension between what has thus far been U.S. dominance of this medium and what is changing and how that's going to affect or not affect things.

Politics. There was a practical politics session on Tuesday, and then there was also one on Thursday morning, I think. The Internet is a big factor in the U.S. presidential campaign right now -- or is it? That's the question for debate. There has been political science study analysis of the impact of the Internet on the 1998 congressional elections. The prevailing view of the person who did this study, who spoke to us, was that candidates in 1998 were using the web site basically as a brochure. It was about as significant as a brochure; it was just another place to find a couple of pictures of the candidate and some information about policies and positions.

That's changing a whole lot in the year 2000, because web sites have now become a major vehicle for fundraising, among other things. But whether it's making a difference is still very much up for grabs.

The second point that Wynne and I both found interesting in terms of how politics is changing is the influence of non-governmental organizations. I put their strength without numbers. You can have an enormously powerful impact now by using the Internet without necessarily having to say that you're the National Rifle Association, and you have a million members.

I've put health there, because I didn't attend any health panels. In fact, there was a separate conference on health the first day, which we didn't go to. Boy, if you read the stuff -- the way the Internet can affect health care delivery -- it's pretty amazing. I guess that's not quite right. We did hear the CEO of drugstore.com, and that's a web site service that allows people to order prescriptions online, either to pick them up from the local chain drugstore or to have them delivered by mail. . . . Now, they haven't solved the authentication problem yet. When you place your order for a prescription, the pharmacists at drugstore.com still have to phone your doctor to verify that it's a real prescription. Clearly they're working on that issue.

The day we were there, the folks at drugstore.com made this announcement that they were offering a new service,

Lastly, government and the way in which government works changes. I've already talked a little bit about those things.

R. Kasper (Chair): Does anyone have any questions of Geoff in regard to any of the topics he's covered so far?

G. Plant: This is really like a tourist's guide to the Internet, which was absolutely amazing.

G. Plant: Okay, issues. . . . Security of the infrastructure. Wynne and I both attended a panel where the question was asked: "How paranoid should we be?" I think we both thought that would be a discussion about privacy issues. It was largely a discussion about the security of Internet transactions and the security of the whole system. Among the things that we learned was that, from the perspective of the real experts, the hackers are bare amateurs. If they knew, not a heck of a lot more, apparently the people who gave us the "I love you" virus could in fact have quite successfully disabled most of the computers on the Internet anywhere.

What's kind of amazing is that it hasn't happened yet, and the basic infrastructure of the Internet seems to be increasingly impervious to that kind of fundamental erosion. One of the guys who spoke on the opening panel, Tim Berners-Lee, created the World Wide Web. We had folks there who were actually there at the beginning of all this. It's kind of amazing, but beyond my ken.

Regulating the infrastructure. By that I mean, in part. . . . Who is it that decides what the domain names are and all of that stuff? That is a subject of considerable debate. There are people who think that there should be very little regulation of the infrastructure, that we should just allow it all to bubble up from the bottom. And then there are people who think there need to be oversight bodies supervising the creation and maintenance of the various technical protocols that are the basis for communication along the Web.

And if there is a body -- and right now there is; it's something called ICANN -- why is it that it's an American body? Why does it have no legislative status? It's simply an agency that has a contractual agreement and a series of contractual agreements with the government of the United States. We actually heard about that on the first day of the conference, because it was in the context of government. Who should be governing the Internet? How is it being governed? Where should it be governed?

We heard a panel debate the right to know. How far does it go? That was really an interesting example of what happens when technology makes perfect information possible. What is the government's right to say: "No, there are some things you don't get to know, because it's not in the interests of national security"?

The government of the United States, through the EPA, has required every major community to have a major disaster plan in the event there is a huge environmental disaster in their community. That's a what-if, doomsday kind of scenario, but most communities have them. Should those plans be on the Internet? Well, the argument that the FBI and the security people make is that if you put those plans on the Internet, it's basically a road map for terrorists -- point 1, do this; step 1, do that.

And then the argument that the people on the other side of the debate have. . . . We heard from the president of the American Civil Liberties Union -- so fairly high-powered stuff: "Well, there's what-ifs. There's been what-ifs and doomsday scenarios for as long as you can imagine. We live in a democratic society. Citizens should have access to what government knows." And there we go. I'm trying to think of other examples of that.

Oh, there was something very interesting. We saw the American Civil Liberties Union at their most eloquent. Dangerous sex offender registries, which are now infinitely possible because of technology. . . . So imagine the situation where you live across the street from someone who is a dangerous sex offender, and of course you now have access to the community registry that tells you that this person is a repeat pedophile. Well, for $150 at your local computer store, you can buy a digital camera. Just put it in your window, connect it to the Internet and broadcast to the world every time someone goes in and out of the house. Or maybe you loan your house to the local police who do that. Perfect surveillance is now perfectly possible. Does it matter when the state is doing it as opposed to an individual? What is the role of the state, if any, in regulating the individual's right to do these things? Anyway, there was an argument; there was not an answer to that question.

G. Plant: Access -- the digital divide. This is everybody's favourite catchword. This obviously refers to people who don't have access to the Internet.

I think, actually, the most interesting. . . . I mean, there's a lot that needs to be said about and thought about if you're changing the way in which you govern yourselves. For example, as is the case in Singapore, if you wish to make an airplane reservation, you must do so on line. You have to figure out how to get on line in order to do airplane reservations in Singapore. Singapore is a small country. They have decided as a matter of national policy that everybody will be on line, and you will only get access to your government and government decisions and information on line. They're going to make sure everybody has a computer, I guess.

The digital divide. One of the things that was most interesting was that one person actually got applause from the crowd. It may have been Mitch Kapor, from the first day, who said that the digital divide is just an excuse for not talking about the social and economic divide. That is, it's just a way of obscuring the real problem, which is that there are poor people in society. Let's not allow this idea of a digital divide to become this sexy way of avoiding expanding technology. Let's use technology as a way of wrestling with the economic and social divides, which are much harder to talk about.

The death of intellectual property -- or its rebirth. Lawyers and the owners of traditional intellectual property are seriously threatened by things like Napster. We heard a bit about that. The lawyers that we heard from seem to think that the idea of intellectual property will survive the technological revolution; it just may change its form.

I've made a point 5 here to remind you that the technological revolution isn't over. Lots of people talked about going wireless and that soon our cell phones are going to be the place where we do all our e-mail stuff and get access to our vast and limitless stock portfolio information. The video point I made there was the point about one of the ways in which we can expand the emotional bandwidth of current electronic communication.

Privacy. We didn't have a direct one-on-one dealing with the issue of privacy at any length at any point in this. It was touched on from time to time. Marc Rotenberg, who's an important privacy advocate in the United States, talked about using the Internet to leverage the power of NGOs as a vehicle for advocacy for privacy. In talking about the security of the infrastructure of the Internet, the point was made that, really, the most serious issue is not whether the infrastructure of the Internet could ever collapse but the fact that a huge number of people in North America appear to be quite willing to do their banking on line in circumstances where there is virtually no security for on-line banking. Anybody could type any account number once you get access to a credit card or something like that. Of course, that has implications for privacy.

We heard a little bit about privacy in the context of the governance of the Internet and the laws that are being made or not made to protect or not protect privacy rights.

To conclude, one piece of trivia that I picked up somewhere along the way. There are apparently, currently pending before the U.S. Congress and state legislative assemblies, over 300 pieces of privacy legislation. The Americans have grabbed the idea of privacy big time. What they're going to do with it, I'm not sure.

That was a pretty speedy overview, but I did want you to know that we had covered an awful lot of interesting stuff, which I think provides a useful context for the task for this committee. I'm grateful to have had that opportunity. But I can't claim to come here having spent three days unlocking the magic key to the particular question of protecting privacy rights in commercial transactions in the private sector.

P. Calendino: Geoff, I'm curious on the issue of security of the infrastructure and regulating. Obviously government is going to have to face up to regulating all business that goes through the Internet sooner or later. We're not doing it at this moment, but part of safeguarding privacy is obviously some form of regulation.

The security issue is one that is obviously in the minds of everybody out there. Was there any discussion of what could be done to prevent things like the "I love you" bug or the one the week after that transforms itself? Things like perhaps even the write-up of software could include anti-bug lines in there. I don't think individual software doesn't have any protection against bugs, etc. It's only the servers that usually -- or the whole network. . . .

G. Plant: That's a very good question, Pietro. There was discussion of that. I can think of three aspects of that discussion. First of all, it was contended by the people on the panel that dealt with that issue, who I would have to describe as the most interesting, compressed collection of mavericks I've seen in quite awhile. . . . We're talking about people who live in their garages, on their computers, you know. They spend days figuring out these things, and then they write books -- in some cases, I think, pretty darn good books.

The first thing is that we all, as individuals, can do stuff, and that includes using anti-virus software. Secondly, ISPs have a role in terms of using more advanced anti-virus software. Thirdly, the people who design software can do more to make it virus-proof. In this regard, I can't vouch for the truth of the contention, but it seemed to be generally accepted by that particular panel that the number one villain here is apparently Microsoft. Microsoft created the potential for most forms

I think you would have heard from that panel that the answer to each of. . . . Given those three contexts in which the security issue can be dealt with -- that is, by the direct consumer, by the Internet service provider and then by the software person. . . . These mavericks were a bunch of libertarian mavericks. That is, they think the answer is that we as consumers have to become more discerning and demanding, and over a relatively short period of time the marketplace will demand a higher and higher level of security, as opposed to any kind of governmental solution. The fluidity of the technology is such that it would be difficult for government to regulate any particular response to viruses. Is that a relatively fair characterization?

W. MacAlpine: One thing that I would add is that Simson Garfinkel, I think, whose book is Database Nation, was one of the most interesting people on the panel. He mentioned that software developers, the companies, should be held accountable -- I don't know if you said that -- for allowing loopholes in their systems. Microsoft has put its Windows scripting host, which is a scripting tool that allows viruses to be written. . . . They've got it on their Microsoft systems. I think it was so that programmers could repair things easier or something like that.

W. MacAlpine: So it wasn't for the purpose of writing viruses, but they knew that it could also be used for that.

W. MacAlpine: But the overriding interest for them was having it available for people to do repairs or. . . .

R. Kasper (Chair): Could we just hold off for Steve, because he's been waiting patiently.

P. Calendino: Okay. The other item is, as you said earlier, that we use e-mail to communicate, and we use the Internet for information. But in the communication part of the e-mail, what I've learned lately is that when you send an e-mail, it doesn't necessarily use just your own servers. But from point A to point B destination it makes several stops -- no security in what happens in all those stops whatsoever. You don't know who accesses. . . . For example, if you order from Amazon.com, and you put your credit card there, it's not just your server that has access to that, but a whole other series of servers that you don't know about.

G. Plant: Well, in fact there are some. . . . I can't remember who said this at one point. But you may be surprised. Your computer may actually be the server for some forms of data in some contexts, and you may be able to remember the particular context. But someone I know said something -- that she was surprised one day to realize that her hard drive was largely filled with material that had reached it. Some other agency was using her hard drive as a storage device for data.

G. Plant: There are ways of preventing this. The techies could tell you how you disable this or turn that off. I've been reading some stuff over the last day or so about cookies, and how as consumers, if we really care a lot about privacy, we really ought to make sure that we tell everybody that we don't want them to use cookies when we're dealing with them, and so on. But we're all one big shared pot of computer data space in the hands of somebody who knows how to do that.

S. Orcherton: It certainly sounded like a good conference to go to. I had originally wanted to go myself, but I couldn't manage all that. But it would have been nice to have all the members actually be in attendance. Then we could have a much more informed debate and discussion about what occurred.

There are two issues I want to talk about. Thanks for the report, because it was very good. One is the issue of this digital divide. Now, I agree that what we're really talking about are the social and economic cleavages that occur all over the world in different areas. Was there any discussion around the United Nations or some other body like that taking on those kinds of questions? That's my first question.

I'll give you my second one, and it's around the legislation. You said there were 360 different pieces of legislation before different legislatures in the United States; I think that was the number. Anyway, certainly a lot of legislatures are wrestling with these questions. We're just sort of wrestling, I

I'm wondering what, specifically, different states are looking at doing. Did you have any of those kinds of discussions with people? The other issue -- tying into the legislative issue -- is that I'm sitting here feeling sort of overwhelmed, given that we've got a global Internet with global amounts of information. I can purchase something from Hong Kong tomorrow, and I have no idea what that retailer is going to do with the information I send him or her. They may purchase the product from Germany, and it may be shipped from Singapore. All that information is floating around.

Just some comments. I don't know what kind of opportunities you had to talk to people. You were only there for a short time; certainly you got a lot of information. Have you got any comments on that, or have you heard anything about those kinds of issues? I'd appreciate some discussion.

G. Plant: The last question, I think, is the most important. We're going to have to get to that question as a committee. That's one of the things I brought home with me. I'll get to it in a moment.

In terms of the response to the digital divide, there are technological responses, if you will. That includes the idea of the kiosk, for example -- put in our local context. If there's a third or 40 or 50 percent of homes in Victoria that don't have home access to the Internet, you can put kiosks in libraries or, frankly, in the local gas station or the 7-Eleven and make access available.

We heard about a small village on the coast of India where some charitable organization has established a little Internet access for the fishermen in the village. Through that they now get access to real weather reports. So instead of looking at the sky and deciding whether to put their lives at risk by heading out for an hour offshore every morning, they can actually know what the weather forecast is. These are people who are probably largely illiterate. There are agencies and people out there working on those problems.

I don't think we specifically heard about the United Nations as a vehicle for that. I know I have certainly heard a lot about large corporation responsibility -- the Microsofts of this world. They are becoming international, or they are international corporations, and need to find ways to make access easier for everyone.

That's a sort of informational response to that issue, which as I say, was on at least two occasions responded to by people who said, "It's not the issue; something else is the issue," which was very interesting. The statistics about the digital divide can be used in different ways. I won't deal with that right now.

The legislation -- the 300 bills -- would cover a huge variety of topics. They could cover issues that might be criminal law, which might be quite different from, say, the narrow question of regulating privacy rights in consumer transactions. There probably is a bunch of health bills, health information bills. There's probably legislation attempting to impose standards around the creation of the technology. They're not all going to be bills that deal with the issue that is described by our terms of reference. I think that through Marc Rotenberg's web site, the EPIC web site, you can get a pretty good snapshot of some of that legislation.

R. Kasper (Chair): What you're saying is that what exists now may not be as embracing as what our terms of reference are, or it would be. . . .

G. Plant: No, the other way round. What's out there being considered is much broader.

G. Plant: But that brings us to the third question. It seems to me there are at least two aspects to this business of being overwhelmed or challenged in terms of our jurisdiction as a committee. The first is that, practically speaking, the jurisdiction of British Columbia is a small cog in this huge wheel. So what does that mean for us as a committee? What does it mean for what the Legislature of British Columbia can do, or ought to think about doing? I have the beginning of an answer to that, but we're way past the business of reporting at this point.

On the other hand, if you're looking at consumer protection, or you're looking at regulating the terms in which people do business, that is provincial jurisdiction, and that brings me to. . . . We don't need to have this discussion, but just sort of as an idea. . . . Having done all this, having learned all about technology and the Internet, we didn't hear people say that the whole concept of who we are as citizens, or the idea of privacy, or the idea of fairness in consumer transactions, was fundamentally being changed.

So what are the principles that should govern fairness in consumer transactions? How do we apply those principles in a context, which includes electronic commerce, but maybe isn't necessarily limited to electronic commerce? In practical terms, does it matter whether the person doing business in Williams Lake, who has a whole bunch of data in the form of a customer list and wants to sell it to somebody in Seattle. . . ? Does it matter in terms of what we're doing whether that customer list is written in a book or a bunch of 3-by-5 cards or

The tentative answer to your third question, because I felt overwhelmed, hourly, for three days, is to look at what it is we're supposed to look at -- privacy and consumer transactions or whatever the terms of reference are -- see if we can identify the principles that we think are important there and then see if and how the Internet has to be taken into account. That's just the beginning of an answer to what I think is the most important, or at least the toughest, question for me, because I was overwhelmed too, sitting there.

W. MacAlpine: Just because of time, I was mentioning to the Chair that I will write up my comments, and that will also enable me to fill in some gaps in my notes and do a bit of background research to supplement those.

But I would like to mention a couple of things that came out of the discussion. That was that at the Internet and Governance Conference, which was May 30, there was a panel on global policy for a global phenomenon -- the role of international organizations and negotiations in Internet governance. That panel was talking about the developments in the World Trade Organization, the OECD and APEC trying to negotiate regulations for e-commerce and the Internet. Herbert Ungerer, who's a directorate general for competition of the European Commission, spoke on that panel. I did a quick search for articles that he's written on these subjects, and he's actually got quite a few. So I will put something together with that so that you can see exactly what these international organizations are doing to regulate e-commerce and the Internet in general.

I was also going to speak about ICANN, which Geoff mentioned earlier, and how that U.S. organization, which is essentially contracted by the American government to assign IP addresses and domain names, is working and some of the conflicts around that. It's not actually an international agency. It's an American agency that has taken over that role, because there's really nothing else at the moment.

I think it comes down to a question of: does government just allow these bodies to put in place the regulations without having due input into what's going on? We've seen exhibited recently, I think, how people -- i.e., without the support of their government, necessarily -- are taking those issues into the street and talking about them. They're very concerned about what's going on. So I think that actually is an important facet. I mean, it is the bigger wheel. We are the small cog in the bigger wheel. But it's still an important aspect of what we need to be discussing, in some sense, in this committee.

G. Plant: Well, there was a. . . . "Consensus" may not be the right word, but everybody who participated in the discussion that Wynne just referred to seemed to acknowledge that in the world after Seattle, if I can put it that way, the credibility of transnational governing authorities was more open to question.

G. Plant: Not shocked completely, but there was a moral authority issue. That was going to have a more enduring impact than we might think on the kinds of initiatives that those organizations have underway.

It was interesting to me to be at the heart of one of the most prestigious schools of government in the United States and to hear that acknowledged fairly readily. I'm not sure that has an impact on what we have to do in this committee -- that may be a discussion we have to have -- but it's certainly something we heard about.

R. Kasper (Chair): Moving along. Wynne, you've given us some additional information. There's a harvard.net.news.

W. MacAlpine: Yeah. I guess some of the stories. . . . They're probably duplicating some of the stories in the newspapers that Geoff handed out.

W. MacAlpine: These are the ones that. . . . It's not all of them, but they're the ones that I thought were most relevant to this committee's work.

R. Kasper (Chair): Okay. And there was something here. . . . The cover says New York Times Magazine.

S. Orcherton: That's great; that's the one that caught my attention. That is what the world looks like in the future, is it?

R. Kasper (Chair): "Why Internet Privacy Matters." Okay, so that's yours, Geoff.

G. Plant: The quote in this article. . . . Somebody used this. In fact, I heard it more than once in the conference. The guy who's the CEO of Sun Microsystems -- this is on page 49 -- apparently said last year at a news conference: "You already have zero privacy; get over it." I thought that was a good controversial statement.

R. Kasper (Chair): Last, there's also a copy of Bill 68, which is the Quebec legislation. One that caught my eye. . . . It says here it's the Privacy Act, RSBC 1996, Chapter 373.

G. Plant: That's right. I saw a statement somewhere that the only privacy legislation in British Columbia was the FOI Act. That's not true. Particularly in the aftermath of this conference where my mind was blown by this huge, wide topic, I was thinking: what has this got to do with this committee? I thought that if we're actually going to talk about privacy, we better remember that there is an existing Privacy Act that deals with some aspects of privacy.

To me what is interesting about this, among other things, is the fact that it makes the violation of privacy a tort. If you put that in a larger context, the issue is: if we, as a committee, were to decide that certain forms of conduct are, for example, to be required as a matter of law, what then is the remedy or sanction for a breach of those obligations? In the federal statute, Bill C-6, there is the privacy commissioner with an ombudsman-like function. At the end of day, in some context, you can go off to the federal court. That is a quasi-administrative process.

Another option -- and they're not mutually exclusive. . . . Let's use the example of someone selling a bunch of data which is personal information without the consent of the people whose information it is. You could give the victims the right to sue. By expanding the definition of the tort of privacy in that context, you might have a debate about the comparative merits of enhancing the bureaucracy with administrative oversight powers versus self-help remedies, which may not be available as readily because they usually involve someone having to go hire a lawyer and that kind of thing. But sooner or later we're going to get to that.

R. Kasper (Chair): . . .which could embrace, I think, what you as a lawyer would term natural justice, so that there is a process where you do eventually get your case heard by somebody, somewhere. You could go through some steps that perhaps aren't too bureaucratic, but you feel as though it's one way to get it resolved, be it arbitration or what have you.

G. Plant: . . .things. Do you want to have the privacy compensation board? Do you want to have a privacy commissioner who does audits? Or do you want to create an expanded right for someone to sue -- just go off to court and say: "I'm suing you; you breached my privacy, and I want damages"? The advantage to that third option, from government's perspective, is that it adds to the workload of Her Majesty's judges. But it doesn't involve any more action by government.

R. Kasper (Chair): No. You're right. Okay. That's good, I appreciate that being brought to our attention. Were there any other items or business? I know that the Clerk's office is making great progress on the decisions that the committee made at our last meeting.

Hearing no other business, Wynne, did you have one more item you wanted to. . . ?

Chair:	* Rick Kasper (Malahat-Juan de Fuca NDP)
Deputy Chair:	* John Weisbeck (Okanagan East L)
Members:	* Pietro Calendino (Burnaby North NDP) Glen Clark (Vancouver-Kingsway NDP) Gerard Janssen (Alberni NDP) * Steve Orcherton (Victoria-Hillside NDP) Erda Walsh (Kootenay NDP) * George Abbott (Shuswap L) * Geoff Plant (Richmond-Steveston L) Katherine Whittred (North Vancouver-Lonsdale L)
Clerk:	Craig James

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON INFORMATION PRIVACY IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE
ON INFORMATION PRIVACY
IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR