Evidence of meeting #58 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was twitter.
A video is available from Parliament.
3:35 p.m.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pierre-Luc Dusseault
Welcome to this 58th meeting. We will continue our study on social media and privacy.
During the first hour, we are very lucky to have Ms. Pirri, who is the legal counsel for Twitter. During our second hour, we will hear from a representative of Acxiom via videoconference.
We will begin with a 10-minute presentation, followed by questions.
Ms. Pirri, you have the floor.
3:35 p.m.
Laura Pirri Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, other distinguished members of the committee. It is a great pleasure to be here in Ottawa with you today to discuss the important subject of social media and protection of our users' personal information.
As some of you know, Twitter is a global communications service that was created in 2006. Since its inception, Twitter has been designed primarily to enable users to share information publicly with the world. In the short span of our company's history we've seen how Twitter can bring people closer and help them feel more connected to what's going on in the world. Twitter can be a very empowering tool for users to be global publishers and information consumers.
We've been privileged to be a platform for famous artists, such as Ai Weiwei, who, although he cannot leave China, can communicate with the world via Twitter.
Twitter has also been used as a platform for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They've used it effectively for community outreach, for recruitment, and for offering support to gays and lesbians who were victims of abuse and bullying.
We are very proud of the role Twitter plays in giving voice to the stories of millions of people every day.
Let me give a little context about how Twitter works. As some of you know, Twitter is a free service that allows people to publish and receive short messages, 140-character messages called “tweets”. Most people using Twitter have accounts. You sign up for an account, and you're able to follow other users. You can automatically see their tweets in your timeline, which is the stream of tweets that you see when you log into the service—although you do not need to have an account to use Twitter to see publicly visible tweets.
Because of the ease of following on Twitter, the ease of using the service as a publishing platform, we now have more than 140 million users around the world. They publish more than 400 million tweets per day in many different languages. There's a real diversity of users and interests represented on Twitter.
We've seen it used for politics and news, art, music, entertainment, sports, fashion, food, culture—you name it. We've seen politicians engaging with citizens. We've seen celebrities responding to fans. We've seen individuals seeking and obtaining redress from global companies. We've seen online literature, charitable campaigns. We've even seen calamity and natural disaster. It's been a way that we could witness what's going on in other parts of the world.
Our goal is to be the platform for the global public conversation, for the global town square that Twitter has become.
Let me talk a little bit about our approach and commitment to privacy, but let me tell you first a little bit about who I am. As you know, I'm Laura Pirri. I am one of the legal counsel at Twitter. My primary responsibility is to advise the company on some of its product initiatives. That includes data protection issues, and it includes compliance with our privacy policy.
Privacy, though, is something the lawyers in the company.... We aren't the only ones who think about it. We have a set of company values, and one of our company values is to defend and respect the user's voice, and that includes respect for the user's personal information.
Our service doesn't require a whole lot of personal information in order to use it. As I mentioned, you can use the service without actually having an account. If you have an account, you don't need to provide a real name or a street address. You don't need to provide age. You don't need to provide gender.
Also, you can protect your tweets if you don't want them to be publicly visible, although it's worth noting that most people come to Twitter in order to share information publicly. They want their tweets to be public.
Drawing on our company values, when we're launching and designing our product features, we do so with privacy in mind. For example, one of our privacy philosophies is to provide contextual notices or disclosures to users in the product at the time that they provide us with information, in order to supplement our privacy policies. I did actually listen to some of the questions that you asked previously.
One of the questions you asked was about privacy policies: do users read them and how do we know that users are aware of our privacy practices? One thing to help ensure that users are aware is to provide additional disclosures, to provide these kinds of contextual notices. Let me give you an example of how we do that. It's our “tweet with location” feature. Since I know that some of you are active users, you may know how this works, but we have a number of different notices and controls around the tweeting with location feature.
First, in order to tweet with location, you have to actually turn it on in the settings. You go to the account settings and you turn on the “ability to share location with Twitter”. Once you've turned it on, when you go to the tweet box, you'll see a location icon that's in the area where you compose your tweet. You have the option to turn location on or off on a per-tweet basis, so you can decide with each tweet whether you want to include your location in the tweet. There's also information about tweeting with location, how it works, and what it means. In addition, if you've tweeted with your location, you can also change your mind later and decide that, actually, you don't want your location in those tweets, so you can go to your account settings and remove location from your tweets without actually deleting the tweet itself.
Twitter is still a young company. It's certainly younger than the other companies you've had here. We're keenly aware that our platform must serve our users well and that we must earn their trust by providing a robust service that is engaging and also safe and secure. Let me close with an example of how we work hard at achieving that balance. I want to talk about a product launch we had earlier this year that I was involved in.
We launched a product feature to tailor suggestions for users, suggestions for accounts to follow in the service. We wanted to help them find in the service more accounts that they might be interested in. For those of you who use the service, I'm sure you know that Twitter is better when you're following people who are talking about things that you're interested in at the moment.
What we found was that we could make much better suggestions for users to help them follow accounts that they're interested in, based on the accounts that are frequently followed by other users who visit the same websites in the Twitter ecosystem. The Twitter ecosystem is all the other websites that have integrated Twitter's buttons and widgets, like our “tweet” buttons and our “follow” buttons that allow you to tweet from other websites or to follow users from other websites. We found that this was a really great way to present users with current and interesting suggestions for who to follow on Twitter.
I'm sure, as many of you know, that this is not unique to Twitter. Other services that are integrated into websites—LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube—also receive this kind of web visit information when users visit pages in which their services have been integrated.
We're very excited that we could make much better suggestions for users to more quickly and easily find what they're looking to follow on Twitter. At the same time, we really wanted to give users simple and meaningful choices around the collection of this information and whether it's collected and used for improving their service experience.
We are very proud to be one of the first major Internet services to implement “do not track“. We implemented it as a way for users to let us know, by setting “do not track” in their browser, that they do not want this information collected. That way we can improve their service experience by making better recommendations. I think it's important to stress that this is a “do not collect” implementation that we made, because we actually don't collect the information. There's been a lot of discussion around “do not track” and exactly how it should be implemented.
We worked collaboratively with the United States Federal Trade Commission in our “do not track” implementation. We also worked with a lot of lawmakers and advocates in the privacy community in the United States, and we were really thrilled with the praise they gave us on our implementation. It was an honour, and we were very appreciative of the kind words they had.
Although we do not have an office here in Canada, and we don't have employees here—in fact, today is our first visit as Twitter employees to Canada—we did reach out to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner here in Canada at the time we did this product launch just to let her know what our plans were and that we planned to implement this product feature and support “do not track”. We hope that our support of “do not track” shows its value as a consumer tool for privacy, and we hope it encourages wider adoption of it as a privacy preference for users.
Thank you very much.
3:45 p.m.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pierre-Luc Dusseault
I forgot to mention at the beginning of the meeting that we thank you for being here. This is very much appreciated, all the more so because of the fairly short notice. I hope that you don't find it too cold in Canada.
So without further ado, I will give the floor to Mr. Angus for seven minutes.
3:45 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much for coming. We're very pleased that you're here, because we're in the final stages of this study. I think that as legislators we're looking across party lines, though I can't speak for my colleagues over there, and I never would try to. We don't want reactive legislation. We want legislation that works so that we can allow the platforms to develop. To us, at least those of us in the New Democratic Party, the enormous possibility for democratic engagement is an essential element.
We think we have a strong privacy regime in Canada. We believe Canadians really value their privacy. They are crazy users of social media—they're all over—but they still want that balance. The question is, how do we strike that balance?
I'd like to ask you about some of the experience with Twitter, because its set-up is different from, say, Facebook's, so it has different strengths and weaknesses. Because of the anonymity features, we've seen a number of cases recently of threatened lawsuits, such as that of Lord McAlpine, who threatened 10,000 Twitter users with lawsuits over re-tweeting allegations about him.
This is certainly putting us into new territory in terms of what is libel and where libel applies. When someone says they're going to sue 10,000 people, 9,000 of them for re-tweeting something that damaged someone's reputation, how does Twitter work with that? Do you say you have to bring a production order to get the data on these anonymous names? Some of them might be obvious, but the vast majority will have an anonymous handle, so how does Twitter deal with those kinds of situations?
3:45 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
We post the law-enforcement guidelines and we require that if you're seeking non-public—so, private, personal—information about our Twitter users, you provide us appropriate legal process, so a subpoena or court order. This is in the interests of protecting our users' privacy.
We also are committed to transparency around law-enforcement requests, so we always notify users when someone has requested their information in this way. This would be the process we would ask parties to pursue if they were looking to receive information.
3:50 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
It would seem to me somewhat difficult to launch 10,000 lawsuits unless you had endless amounts of money. In Lord McAlpine's case, I think he was asking for apologies from the tweeters.
In that case, would you insist on production orders for each of the 10,000 against whom a case was being brought? Do you deal with his legal team? It will be somewhat precedent-setting if this kind of case goes forward.
3:50 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of his case.
I think Twitter, similar to the Internet, is a platform for speaking. The dispute resolution aspect of identifying the speaker you're talking to certainly has its challenges. I'm not sure Twitter has a role. We have rules that govern the use of our platform, so of course, we expect that the people using our service are in compliance with our rules. If it's speech that's otherwise in compliance and not unlawful, the users are going to have to find ways to resolve their disputes. Unfortunately, if it goes into the court system, this is a challenge in bringing litigation.
3:50 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
I'll give you a different example that came to our committee. A staffer in the Liberal Party set up an anonymous Twitter account and released the court affidavits of a cabinet minister's very messy divorce. I don't think anything in it was inaccurate, but it certainly caused a brouhaha. The staffer killed that account. Now, what happens to that information? Is it still part of the Twitter database?
3:50 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Someone set up an account, released all kinds of gory details about a very messy public divorce into the Twittersphere, then got political heat, and then shut down the account. There's nothing actionable, as far we can see. Where is that data? Does it disappear when the person shuts down the account, or is that part of the Twitter database?
3:50 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Again, I'm not familiar with the specific situation. A user can deactivate an account. It's in your account settings. We have a process for account deletion to happen soon after. There's a 30-day grace period during which your account is deactivated. It's removed from the service as of the time you deactivate it. Then it's deleted. The process for deleting starts happening 30 days later.
3:50 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
You're dealing with a reseller, Gnip, to launch the historical power tracker for Twitter, which provides access to the complete data archives. It says that there are 30 billion social data activities a month being delivered. I guess that would be the history of people's tweets. Does that include deleted accounts, or do deleted accounts become deleted information?
3:50 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
For parties accessing public information through our public APIs,when tweets are deleted, they are deleted from the public API stream as well.
3:50 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
I notice that there's Politwoops. It's about politicians who delete their tweets. I have to say, having followed some of my colleagues, that sometimes when they really mean to say things, they are pretty inane, so when they have to delete something, it's usually really idiotic. It's usually after nine o'clock at night on a Friday night and they panic and realize, “Oh my God, did I just do that?” Then they press the delete button, which seems to kick off an algorithm at Politwoops. They grab it and put it on the site so you can check infamous political tweets that were deleted.
Does that happen with Twitter? Does the embarrassing tweet get deleted from Twitter when it happens, and does Politwoops pick it up from the ether? How does that work?
3:50 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
It's fascinating. It's actually the best Twitter feed I've read recently, and I don't even read Twitter anymore.
A politician deletes something he or she said that is absolutely inane, because the person drank two bottles of wine and wanted to pick a fight with another politician. Does it disappear, or does it become...?
3:50 p.m.
A Voice
It would never happen.
3:50 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
It would never happen on our side. I'm looking at some of my colleagues, but not the ones in this room, of course.
What would happen to the tweet? Does it disappear into the netherworld, or is it there as a permanent record?
3:55 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
We wouldn't be providing it through our API. Now, if people already have it in their possession prior to deletion, it sits there. They copied it. We can indicate that there's a deletion notice. People who are using our APIs under our developer terms are required to honour these deletion notices. It sounds like they're letting them remain on.
3:55 p.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
I just want to be on the record that I'm not saying we need digital mittens to protect politicians from being stupid. I was just wondering what happens if they delete the tweet, if it disappears.
3:55 p.m.
NDP
3:55 p.m.
NDP
3:55 p.m.
Conservative
Brad Butt Conservative Mississauga—Streetsville, ON
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Pirri, for being here. Welcome to Canada. We're glad to have you here for those of us who are rabid tweeters, not as rabid as Kady O'Malley is in the back there, but some of us like to send lots of tweets out. We even have our friends like Mr. Angus, who used to do it and then decided to quit.
I didn't know about this Politwoops thing so I think that's kind of interesting. It might give me something to do on the plane on the way home tonight back to Mississauga.
This has been a fascinating study. I think all members of the committee, regardless of whether they're government members or opposition members, have really gotten a lot out of this. I think our goal on this whole thing is to make sure we don't stifle the creativity and the innovation, and what Canadians want out of social media, because they clearly want it. They're using it, they believe in it. It's an important communication vehicle for them through their friends, through their colleagues, and so on. But I think we want to make sure that we're also having a strong balance to make sure people's privacy is protected.
My oldest daughter is 13. She tweets, and I'm always worried, concerned as a father to make sure that her personal, private information is not part of it. Most of her tweets are fun little things. I think it's innocent and it's all good, but as a father I worry.
Have you been able to come up with policies within the organization to make sure that younger users of the service...? It's great for adults to send something out, or violate their own privacy. We're adults. We should take some responsibility. But when you have a 13-year-old daughter, you are concerned. You want to make sure she has some latitude and freedom to enjoy communicating with her friends through an excellent social medium, but you also want to make sure that their privacy is being protected. Do you differentiate in users around younger users of the system and people my age and others who really should know better in what they're sending and how their privacy is being protected?
3:55 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Our service is not intended for users under 13, and we specify this in our privacy policy. If we do become aware that people under 13 are using our service, if that's brought to our attention, we will delete their accounts. We also provide resources for parents and teens. Those are linked to our privacy policy.
It's important for us to empower people to protect themselves on the service, and it's important for us to provide tools and features in Twitter itself that actually do that. Our resources talk a little bit about this. Some of those features are, as I mentioned, you can protect your Twitter account such that your tweets are not publicly visible. If you're concerned about who might view them, you protect your account and approve who gets to see them. You can also block other users of the service if you don't like what they say. I also just think that the nature of following other users...because it's unlike other services, you don't have to follow me just because I follow you, so people can follow and “unfollow” at will. So if you don't like what someone is saying, it's very simple—