Thank you very much.
Again, yes, our CEO does apologize that he could not be here today in person with the committee. I am here with my colleague Rob Sherman on his behalf. Thank you for that note, sir.
Mr. Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, thank you for the invitation to appear before you today. My name is Kevin Chan, and I am the head of public policy for Facebook Canada. I am joined via video conference by my colleague Rob Sherman, Facebook's deputy chief privacy officer.
Before I start, I want to acknowledge our offer earlier this week to pre-brief committee members on the Cambridge Analytica situation. Over the past few weeks, we have made a large volume of announcements for which we have done pre-briefs to U.S. lawmakers prior to last week's congressional hearings. We want to extend that same offer as a courtesy to members of this committee. I regret that our intentions may have been unclear.
I want to begin by sharing that while we do not yet have all the facts surrounding the situation with Cambridge Analytica, what has alleged to have occurred is a huge breach of trust to our users, and for that we are very sorry.
Given the scale of our service, with more than 23 million Canadians using Facebook every month—and more than 2 billion people globally—we recognize the role we play in people's lives and the need to take greater responsibility for that.
It goes without saying that the events of recent weeks involving the protection of personal data is of concern to us all. With hindsight, it is clear that Facebook had not invested enough in the security of our platform, and, for that, we are responsible. We have a duty of extreme vigilance and we are going to do everything we can to make the required corrections in order to regain the trust of those who use the platform.
The events of the last few weeks have taught us some important lessons. Trust in our service is at the core of what we do at Facebook. As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said, “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you.”
As Facebook has grown, people have gotten powerful tools to stay connected to those they care about, make their voices heard, and build communities and businesses, but it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a mistake.
In Canada and around the world, we know we have a lot of work to do, and this is just the beginning. We are of course also fully co-operating with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as it conducts its investigation into the matter.
I would like to turn now to my colleague Rob Sherman, who can take you through some of the facts as we know them today and the actions we are taking to prevent abuse from happening on our platform going forward.