Mr. Chair, committee members, my name is Rob Sherman, and I am Facebook's manager of privacy and public policy. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you about Facebook's commitment with respect to protecting personal information.
I will address the committee today in English.
At Facebook our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We're committed to providing an innovative, industry-leading service, helping people to connect and share with each other online. We're equally committed to providing privacy tools that enable people to control the information they share and the connections they make through our platform. The trust of our users is fundamentally important to us at Facebook.
Thanks to the transformative effects of social technology, people can enjoy constant connectivity, personalized content, and interactive social experiences across a range of devices. On Facebook, for example, people have a highly individualized experience that's based on information that their own unique circle of friends has shared. Canada, with 18 million monthly active users, is among the most engaged Facebook populations in the world. Four of five Internet users in Canada are on Facebook.
The growth of this interactive social web has brought tremendous social and economic benefits to society, and we're heartened to see the growing use of Facebook in Canada. Members of Parliament use Facebook to reach their constituents, and small businesses in Canada increasingly are relying on Facebook and other social media to generate exposure for their companies, increase sales, and obtain new business partnerships.
As an example, Shopify, an Ottawa-based e-commerce software company, has seen a 31% increase in referral traffic coming from Facebook since June of this year. The online retailer eLUXE increased newsletter subscriptions 37%, again on Facebook.
Facebook provides a platform for thousands of active developers in Canada to build applications, products, and games. Through our preferred marketing developer program, Facebook offers support and resources to Canadian companies that are building these products and these companies in turn are able to provide highly skilled jobs in technology and generate millions of dollars in revenue in Canada.
While economic development and social engagements are critical benefits of the Facebook service, we believe trust is the foundation of the social web. People will only feel comfortable sharing online if they have control over who will see their information and if they have confidence in the people who will receive it. Facebook builds trust first and foremost through the products and services that we provide.
We realize that people have different approaches to sharing information on our service. For example, some people want to share everything with everyone. Some people want to share very little with a small audience, and most people are somewhere in between.
So a one-size-fits-all approach to privacy would never satisfy every person's expectations. Instead, we strive to create tools and controls that help people understand how sharing works on Facebook, so they can choose how broadly or narrowly they wish to share their information. A key focus of our business is our commitment to basic principles of transparency and control.
I want to highlight our work in these areas and provide an overview of the steps we've taken to demonstrate our accountability. With respect to transparency, our goal is to be transparent and open with our users about how their data may be used. We recognize that long and complex privacy policies can make it difficult for people to understand how their information is being used, but we also believe it's important to provide people with specific and concrete information about our data management practices. For these reasons, we designed our data use policy to be both easy to understand and comprehensive. The policy, which is accessible from almost every page on our website, describes in plain language our data use practices and includes a straightforward guide to privacy on Facebook.
We use a layered approach, summarizing our practices on the front page, and then allowing people to click through the policy for more details. Content is organized by topic, which lets people find exactly what they're looking for quickly and easily. People who want to read the entire policy on one page can do that as well. If they have questions about specific issues, they can find an answer by conducting a search within our help centre.
We wanted to provide the information people want to know in the way they want to receive it, so we designed Facebook's data use policy based on feedback from users, regulators, and other stakeholders. When we announce proposed changes to our data use policy or our statement of rights and responsibilities, we give people the ability to comment on changes before they take effect. Our choice to give users a significant role in how Facebook operates, and to seek their input before we make these policy changes, reflects a leading best practice in our industry.
With regard to control, in addition to our commitment to transparency, we continue to find new and innovative ways to build individual control into the user experience. Over the past year and a half, for example, we've launched more than 20 new privacy-enhancing tools that empower people to control their information. Whenever people post on Facebook, our inline audience selector enables them to determine the audience with whom the post will be shared. Importantly, these controls are available at the exact moment and in the exact context in which the person is making a decision about his or her data. In other words, if I post a picture of my family on Facebook, I can decide then and there who will see that photo.
Facebook's activity log allows people to see all their posts in one place. They can review privacy decisions they've made, change the audience for their posts, and delete posts altogether. We also inform people when someone else has identified them in a post. This is a process we call “tagging”.
Tagging is an innovative privacy-enhancing technology, giving people control over information that's shared about them on Facebook. If people don't like a post they're tagged in, they can take action. For example, they can remove the tag, report it to Facebook, or send a message directly to the person who posted it. We're proud to give users this control, because we value their privacy and their trust.
In November we launched more prominent and detailed privacy information, presented to new users during the sign-up process on Facebook.
Another tool we offer is “download your information”, a place where people can download an archive of information associated with their Facebook accounts, including photos, posts, and messages. This tool makes it easy for people to take their information with them if they want to use it elsewhere.
Finally, we offer an application dashboard so people can review the specific kinds of information each application can access on Facebook and make choices about what access apps should have to their Facebook accounts going forward.
Transparency and control don't effectively promote trust unless we're accountable to our users and to our regulators for honouring the commitments that we make. To that end, we implemented a comprehensive privacy program that incorporates privacy by design. This program involves a broad cross-functional privacy review of products at all stages of development and before they're released.
The Irish Data Protection Commissioner recently completed a comprehensive audit of Facebook's privacy practices and indicated that he “found a positive approach and commitment on the part of Facebook to respecting the privacy rights of its users”. The audit report described Facebook practices in detail, and summarized additional ways we're working to improve privacy protections that we offer.
Following guidance from the Federal Trade Commission, we've established a biennial independent audit to ensure we're living up to our privacy commitments.
Finally, a word about family safety. As we work each day to earn the trust of our users, we recognize that we must focus our efforts on the interests of the entire Facebook community, including the teens who use our service. To properly educate and engage young people on how to safely use the Internet, communication between parents, teachers, and teens is vital. To facilitate this conversation, we provide resources on security awareness and online safety. Our family safety centre, for example, contains specific content for parents, teens, educators, and law enforcement. A Facebook safety page provides dynamic safety content that people can import directly into their newsfeeds. We've also established a safety advisory board, an expert organization with many internationally recognized safety experts who provide us with advice on products and policy.
In Canada, Facebook has taken the initiative to address local safety issues. During bullying awareness week, for example, we partnered with Canadian non-profits to launch the “Be Bold: Stop Bullying” campaign. This campaign centres around an interactive social pledge app and a resource centre that contains educational materials on bullying prevention.
Facebook is always striving to develop better tools to keep and build the trust of those who use our services. We look forward to continuing our dialogue with the special committee, the privacy commissioner, Parliament, and other stakeholders about how government and industry can work together to best promote economic development in Canada while protecting the privacy of Canadians.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify today.