Information & Ethics Committee on Dec. 13th, 2023

[Rachel Curran]

We disagree with that, Mr. Green.

Look, mental health is a complex, individualized issue impacted by a variety of societal and emotional factors. As—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Ms. Curran.

[Rachel Curran]

—many experts in the field say, it's wrong and even irresponsible to suggest that a single factor is the cause of trends in teen mental health—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Ms. Curran, I apologize. We are over time by a bit here.

That concludes our first round. If there are any other issues that you want to address, perhaps you can do that in the next round.

We have Mrs. Vecchio for five minutes.

Go ahead, please.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Thank you very much.

Today in the House of Commons, we actually passed Bill S-210 to go to committee. It's looking at age verification to ensure that minors are not seeing pornography.

I'm going to start with you, Jeannette, if you don't mind, regarding parental controls. Can you share with me right now how many children, as you're investigating, are able to bypass those parental controls? Do you have statistics showing that?

[Jeanette Patell]

Maybe what I can speak to is the fact that YouTube, for example, as you are likely aware, is designed for users 13 years of age and older. In order to have a YouTube account, they have to go through a process where date of birth is provided. Our system—

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I have a quick question on that. My son, who's 20 years old, is probably celebrating his “40th” birthday soon. Can you not just lie about your date of birth?

[Jeanette Patell]

Let me walk you through the steps. We have a neutral process where we ask for a date of birth. If a user indicates that they are under the age requirement, for example, there are no take-backs. That attempt is blocked. We funnel them through to our parental supervision process.

That said, if our system does—

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Okay. I appreciate that. Very quickly, because I don't have a lot of time, what does that look like? At what point do you find out? Specifically with pornography, if you were going to go and rent a movie, you would have to be over the age of 18. If you're able to get pornography online, how can we ensure that children under the age of 18 are not able to get pornography?

[Jeanette Patell]

Maybe I'll speak to two things here.

First, pornography is not allowed on YouTube. Any sexually explicit content or nudity is not allowed on YouTube. That violates our community guidelines. For—

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I have a quick question there. You've noted how many times...and I've seen that people are pulling down accounts. Have you had to pull down pornography from your regular YouTube sites?

[Jeanette Patell]

We publish quarterly transparency reports. We break down the reasons for which we would be removing any content. Yes, we would be removing sexually explicit content or content where there is nudity. That would be one of the areas where we are enforcing our policies.

I think it's important to note that over 90% of the time, that violative content is first detected by our machines. That allows us to deal with this at scale and to do it rapidly. We can remove content rapidly from our systems. We also enable users to report content they have concerns around so that it can be reviewed and removed if it violates our policies.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

That's very fair. I appreciate that.

Maybe I can move over to Facebook and talk about that. We were talking about rabbit holes, where 11- and 12-year-olds are getting into rabbit holes. I think that's what led me to finding pornography one time, unintentionally, with my 11-year-old son.

Perhaps you could share with me what there is in Facebook to ensure that there is nothing online that is explicit and that a child or an adult who does not intend to would be able to access, to ensure that we don't go down some type of rabbit hole like that.

[Rachel Curran]

Thank you for raising this really important issue, Mrs. Vecchio.

Facebook significantly restricts the display of nudity or sexual activity on our platforms. We don't allow it. In fact, we remove sexual imagery to prevent the sharing of non-consensual or underage content as well. Restrictions on the display of sexual activity also apply to digitally created content unless it's posted for educational or satirical purposes. We remove any explicit material.

In fact, we've previously run into criticism for over-enforcing on that kind of material and not allowing images of breast feeding, for instance. We're constantly working to make sure our policies are nuanced enough so that we're not over-enforcing on explicit imagery.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Perfect. Thank you so much.

I'm going to switch over to X Corporation. When it comes to explicit content, again, we know that rabbit holes are there. What do you do to ensure that explicit content is not available to the viewers?

[Wifredo Fernández]

Users who are under 18 or who did not include a birthdate on their profile are restricted from viewing such content.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mrs. Vecchio.

Mr. Bains, you have five minutes. Go ahead, sir.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for joining us today.

I'll begin my first question with Google.

Has Google or YouTube ever shared the data of Canadians with foreign governments or other jurisdictions?

[Jeanette Patell]

Thank you for the question.

I'm actually going to turn to my colleague [Technical difficulty—Editor].

[Shane Huntley]

Certainly. We publish our transparency reports on government requests about lawful data access, which Jeanette spoke to in her opening statement.

We assess each request under both the U.S. law and the local law and also under international norms. We assess each one and provide data, and then we have transparency reports. We also reveal that if the use of data is provided, we provide that where we are able to under the law.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

My question was whether the information is shared with foreign governments—other governments.

I'll move on. Maybe this can explain it a bit better. On December 6, U.S. Senator Wyden released a letter: “Unidentified governments are surveilling smart phone users via their apps' push notifications, a US senator warned on Wednesday.... These are the audible 'dings', or visual indicators, which users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game.” Most of these “travel over Google and Apple's servers.”

What can you tell us about these government requests for user data?

[Shane Huntley]

We are aware of Senator Wyden's letter and [Inaudible—Editor]. This was from.... I am not aware of the specifics, and the specifics were not provided with regard to his anonymous source. I would say that anything provided here would fall under the same policies I just spoke about in terms of it needing to be under lawful requests coming from a legal process, which we would assess closely. Any such request would be covered under our transparency reports in terms of—

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Okay. Thank you.

I'll move on to a similar question for Meta.

Has Meta ever shared the data of Canadians with foreign governments or other jurisdictions?

[Rachel Curran]

Thank you for that question.

I'll turn it over to my colleague Mr. Gleicher.

[Nathaniel Gleicher]

Thank you for the question.

Not too dissimilar from what our colleagues from Google described, we review lawful requests that we receive from governments around the world. We review them carefully, both under U.S. law and local law and international norms. We push back on requests that are overly broad, and when we do disclose data, we have a report where we share information about any data that was disclosed, but here we're talking about pursuant to lawful requests and responses to those requests.