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.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
Yes, from people I'm following. I did not send them that direct message. How often does that service get breached?
4:05 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
I see, so it's a situation where the person you were following had their account compromised, and someone else sent the message.
Certainly, security is extremely important to the company, and we encourage our users to keep their own passwords secure and to enter in very secure passwords.
We are ourselves constantly providing additional security features for users. Unfortunately it does happen that sometimes people don't choose this—
4:05 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
I don't know. I don't have statistics offhand. But yes, if people don't choose secure passwords.... Whenever someone resets a password it goes through the process for when they believe their account's been compromised, and we do advise them on all of the best security practices to make sure that doesn't happen again.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
It seems as if it happens more often, that it's quite frequent that you get these types of direct messages that were compromised.
4:05 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Yes. Twitter is always working to try to protect against any kind of spam attacks as well, and trying to make sure user accounts aren't phished. This is something we constantly work on. We have a whole team in San Francisco dedicated to protecting security. We do try to make sure incidents like that don't happen.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
You mentioned that you spoke with our Privacy Commissioner. Is the FTC your primary regulator for where you set the bar on privacy issues within the Twitter organization? Have you been dealing with any other privacy commissioners? Has Twitter been directed to do anything by any other governments in the privacy department?
4:05 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
We are a United States-based company, so the FTC is our privacy regulator. We are aware that we have users outside the United States even though our operations are in the United States and our headquarters are there. We are always open to collaborating with other commissioners and interested in privacy standards that are outside the United States.
As I said, trust is extremely important to us, so we are looking to do things, for example, implementing “do not track”, because we think that will build trust with our users.
We are open to being collaborative. We have not had any, I think you asked, dealings with other—
4:10 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
No. We've had communications; we've reached out to people in the same way that we gave the Privacy Commissioner here a call, just to let them know we were launching this feature and supporting “do not track”. We've worked very collaboratively.
4:10 p.m.
NDP
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Earl Dreeshen Conservative Red Deer, AB
Thank you very much, and it's great that you could be here today.
When we were in Washington, we had an opportunity to speak with the FTC, as Scott just mentioned, but also with some people who talked about the concept of privacy and perhaps looked at it in ways that not everyone has uppermost in their minds. They were talking about privacy versus fairness, inaccurate information being presented about oneself; seclusion, the right to be left alone; security, making sure that private information about your home and your family and so on is kept out of the media; liberty, the opportunity to be able to decide for yourself what you are going to be doing; and basic dignity.
These are the kinds of lenses that some of the people we were talking to asked us to consider, or at least keep in mind as we go through this particular study, because it is not one that is going on in different parts of the world.
How do you reconcile the use of your platform with some of the abuses of privacy, with some of those things that I've just outlined? Do you look at it a little differently for each of those aspects of privacy? Could you comment on that, please?
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Earl Dreeshen Conservative Red Deer, AB
There are the different aspects of it, different ways of looking at privacy, but we just use the one word to describe it. There are so many different levels, and I'm just wondering if there's an awareness of that or if you ever take a look at it through that lens when you are trying to think about your privacy policies. That's why we are here, to take a look at the privacy policies and to see whether or not companies are flexible and are capable of reacting to new issues that might come up because they hadn't thought about them.
That's where I'm going with my question.
4:10 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Yes, absolutely, I would say that a lot of the privacy principles that are being advocated in the United States as well are around not just notice, disclosure, security, information access, and the right to delete information or modify information. We certainly think about those things as well. Our privacy policy attempts to disclose to users all the different controls and tools that we give them around the information we collect, how it can be modified, and how it can be deleted. We give users those kinds of controls and that kind of access to the information we're providing on our service.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Earl Dreeshen Conservative Red Deer, AB
The other aspect of it is that people feel it is free; they're not paying every time, it's not like putting coins into a telephone. They have this concept that it is free, but of course you have to make money to function and to do as well as you do.
I noticed in some of the descriptions about the company, it says that Twitter does use cookie technology to collect additional website usage data and to improve its services. Could you outline for people so they really understand what your business model is? There's nothing wrong with that, and if it weren't for the fact that you could make money, it wouldn't happen. Could you give me a bit of background as to what you use and why you use it? Then perhaps people can get a better idea of what this free function is all about.
4:10 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
Sure; unlike other services, we don't have display advertising. We have what we call our own promoted products, which are organic and integrated into the Twitter service. The different promoted products we have are promoted accounts, promoted tweets, and promoted trends. Those are all parts of the Twitter service, and we just have a component of them that's promoted. We show people our promoted products in the same way that we try to show them other content that we think they may be interested in.
For example, when you see suggestions for accounts for you to follow, we may show you a promoted account in connection with other accounts that are not promoted. In the same way that we were talking about earlier, we may suggest that you follow particular accounts because people you are already following have already followed those accounts; we might do the same thing with a promoted account.
For example, I follow a bunch of lawyers, a bunch of technology journalists, and some privacy researchers. These people may be following an account that is an upcoming privacy conference. Perhaps the privacy conference has decided to promote its account, given that the conference is coming up and they want more people to be aware of what's going on, so that might show up as a promoted account.
4:15 p.m.
Conservative
Earl Dreeshen Conservative Red Deer, AB
If somebody was re-tweeting an article they'd read, would you have a way of tracking that? I mean, this is the use, through your platform, of someone else's...and of course there's advertising taking place, perhaps, if you are sent to another media source or whatever.
Is there a way that this would be tracked through your service, or is it just a case that you get a chance to use it and that's good enough? Do you have a way of continuing out, just to see how it's being used in different media?
4:15 p.m.
Conservative
Earl Dreeshen Conservative Red Deer, AB
Yes. I'm just wondering; you had the platform there, which allowed it to be directed there—
4:15 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
To my privacy conference, let's say—hypothetically.
4:15 p.m.
Legal Counsel, Twitter Inc.
No, not off the Twitter service. I gave the example in my opening comments about Twitter when integrated into other services; we'll receive web visit information in those kinds of situations. Otherwise we will not know off Twitter.
4:15 p.m.
NDP
The Chair NDP Pierre-Luc Dusseault
Thank you, Mr. Dreeshen. Unfortunately, your time is up.
I will now give the floor to Mr. Boulerice for five minutes.
December 6th, 2012 / 4:15 p.m.
NDP
Alexandre Boulerice NDP Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Good afternoon, Ms. Pirri. Thank you for being here. It's much appreciated.
Like many of my politician colleagues, I use Twitter a lot, of course. You have revolutionized political communication by forcing us to express our ideas in 140 characters. We now have to express our ideas concisely.
I will come back to an issue which was raised by my colleague.
You provide consumers and citizens with a free service. As well, there really isn't any advertising on Twitter, as opposed to Facebook, which does a lot of advertising. I still don't really understand where you make your money.