Steve Saretsky

The way this is drafted is large enough to include podcasters, and frankly, just about anybody that offers a service electronically.

And there are at least a couple of elements that I should quickly highlight.

One is what's known as a mandatory metadata retention requirement, which is a bit of a mouthful.

But what it effectively means is that metadata, information about data,

where some about the devices people use, where they're located, who they communicate with.

So not necessarily the content of their message, but all the information about the message itself.

All of that will, under this law, could be required to be retained by providers for up to a year.

Now, at the moment, many providers don't retain any of that information, or if they do, they do it for a fairly short period of time.

There's not a lot of commercial reason to do so.

If you're requiring retention of metadata for a year, which I should note, the United States does not require at all.

Europe has struck down as being disproportionate.

We're talking about an enormous amount of information, essentially building a massive haystack

covering 99.9% of Canadians that haven't done anything wrong in order to get the proverbial needle every once in a while.

And you're retaining that for a full year.

It raises huge potential privacy implications because it basically creates a surveillance map of just about everybody for an entire year.

I mean, think of your device.

which is typically going to be on your person everywhere you go.

And someone can map out.

This is when they go to the gym.

This is where their kids go to school.