Information & Ethics Committee on Dec. 6th, 2012

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Just on that, if someone decides to follow me, and I know you get the prompt—so-and-so is now following you—and it comes through, I don't have the right to say to them they cannot follow me. Is that correct? With Facebook, I can decide to make someone my friend or not, but if someone wants to follow me on Twitter, I can't block them from following me. Is that not correct?

[Laura Pirri]

You can block users.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

You can block someone from following you.

[Laura Pirri]

You can block users.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

I didn't think you could do that. I have some work to do when I get out of here. I'm kidding.

My last question is—

[Laura Pirri]

Sorry, you're saying if your account is protected, or are you talking about—

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Just a regular public account.

[Laura Pirri]

I'm sorry. You should protect your account if you don't want...otherwise it's public. Your tweets are public.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

If you reset your system to be a private account, you can block out anyone who decides to follow you. You actually have the ability to say, no, I don't want this person following me?

[Laura Pirri]

You have to approve them.

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

All right.

When I get sent an email through my system and it's prompting me and suggesting that I follow so-and-so, how is that match being done? I assume that Twitter is looking at my profile as an individual, which some people could argue is private. I happen to be an MP and I'm married and I have kids, blah, blah, blah—and those are things I've done—but when I'm getting prompted that I should be following certain people because that fits a profile, is there a way to look at whether that violates any privacy rules? Obviously someone has made that determination in the back office that I should be following so-and-so because I happen to be a member of Parliament, or I happen to be a father or a hockey player, or whatever I am.

Where do you draw the line, as an organization, around those kinds of things, to make sure you're not stepping over? You're using private information about me and who I am to basically encourage me to be a more active user of the system. That's the whole idea of Twitter, right? It's to have more and more people communicating with more and more people. That's the whole idea.

Is there a way you strike that balance?

[Laura Pirri]

As I mentioned earlier, we don't require a lot of private personal information in order to use the service. A lot of our recommendations are based on who you are already publicly following, for example. Perhaps the people you're already publicly following are also publicly following...for example, if you happen to follow a lot of the same people someone else follows, we may suggest you follow some of the people they're following but you aren't already following, because we assume you are interested in the same—

[Brad Butt, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

It's based on the public information I'm actually tweeting out, or things I'm following or receiving.

It's not based on my private profile as an individual—my private information. It's based on what I'm actually doing on your service.

[Laura Pirri]

You are not required to provide much private information, so we can make suggestions for you without having any kind of information about who you actually are.

That's how we're able to have anonymous users on our service. You can actually see in the suggestions that often they'll say “We suggest that you follow this person”. Then, we'll say that this person is already followed by other accounts and we'll show the photos of the people who are already following that person.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

I will now give the floor to Mr. Andrews for seven minutes.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, Laura.

I have a question on this anonymous part of Twitter. Have you reviewed how anonymous Twitter can be, and would you consider changing the business model to be not so anonymous, so for those who are posting on Twitter or commenting on Twitter, people can really know their true identity? Having said that, I also know that with Twitter you have verified accounts, official accounts, where I would assume it's been verified that they are those people.

How do you balance the two?

[Laura Pirri]

Clearly the verified accounts are not anonymous accounts, and for those accounts we think it is useful for other users of the service to know this is in fact that user. Having identity information for them helps provide users with an engaging service because they can find the celebrity or the politician they are looking for.

With respect to anonymous accounts, we believe there's a real value to allowing users to speak anonymously on our platform. It's something we're quite proud of. As a company, we've seen human rights activists or journalists in repressive regimes, for example, who are expressing unpopular viewpoints. It's part of our goal to be the platform to represent the stories and the voices of so many different users. We think it's important to allow those voices to be heard and for them to speak without providing identifying information that may have consequences where they may live. We've seen this in many cases over the course of our company's history, and it's something we're proud to provide.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Who decides whether a service is verified? Can a user decide they want their page to be verified, or is that something Twitter does if you get to a certain level of followers?

[Laura Pirri]

We have a help page that has information about it. Usually you do it at a point when you have a certain number of followers.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Can the user initiate that verified...?

[Laura Pirri]

The user can initiate it, exactly.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

With regard to the direct message features of Twitter, one would assume that's private between two individuals, but there have been a number of breaches of the direct message services where I've gotten the same message.... It's like someone's been hacked, and blah, blah.

How often does this happen, and is it a major security concern of Twitter, how often these direct messages get hacked?

[Laura Pirri]

I'm sorry, what is the circumstance in which the message is...?

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

In direct messages, between two users on Twitter. In the last month or so I've received several messages from—

[Laura Pirri]

From people you're following already?