Evidence of meeting #101 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was work.
A video is available from Parliament.
9:50 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
As I mentioned, we started work with SCL in 2013, and we did that work in Trinidad and Tobago. In 2014 they asked us to make a special American political CRM, which we've talked about. We did some online advertising for them along the way as well.
We finished working with them in 2016 and have not worked with them or contacted them since.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
So this was very straight up. You were subcontracting. Do they refer people to you? Clearly, you have personal relationships with some of the key people there.
9:50 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
I had a personal relationship with Mr. Wylie previous to his introduction to SCL, but he left SCL in 2014. We continued to do some work for SCL until 2016.
Typically they would have a client who wanted services that they needed help with in terms of software development or online advertising, and they would ask us if we would like to help them with that.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Have you received datasets from Cambridge Analytica? You mentioned you had access to Google Drive, but have you received data from them or from SCL?
9:50 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
We worked directly with SCL.
During an election, just as with any regular candidate, if there were a political CRM we were supporting, then they might provide the voter file list of registered electors for that particular campaign. Then we would load that into the political CRM for them.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Mr. Vickery, when he testified, talked about certain electronic fingerprints, the ID number of a piece of data, or the listing of somebody as a client, and suggested that it made the relationship look as though it were the same company, the exact same dataset, as opposed to two separate datasets.
9:50 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
I don't know what the researcher was referring to there, but I can say that the only information we received from SCL in the provisioning of services for SCL was specifically for those campaigns that we were assisting with.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
You mentioned that you don't have a data repository, but you—
9:50 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
We certainly have databases that we use, but we don't retain any personal information from one campaign to the next. When a campaign or a client stops working with us, we delete all of that information.
We provide the tool, or the platform, like a political CRM, for a customer, and during that time, it does have personal contact information in it. Then once the campaign is over and our contract work is done, we delete that information.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
And you've never transferred that information to any outside source before deleting it?
9:55 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
No, we don't transfer that information to anyone, other than back to the people who provided it to us.
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
In addition to the actual data, obviously a lot of these Facebook profiles are used to create these psychosocial behavioural profiles. Cambridge Analytica, according to the media, had 30 million of these psychographic profiles. Did you ever have access to those profiles?
9:55 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
SCL is the one we were contracted to. When SCL provided information to us for voters during elections in the U.S., some scores or rankings were contained in that information. One of those was, for example, a turnout score. A turnout score might be something you use when going door to door in order to see who you should go to first or last based on how many elections a person has voted in previously. In the U.S., of course, voter turnout in elections is public information. But it also had five rankings or scores for personality in it.
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Would you have ever used these scores for other clients, in order to determine which ads to target which people on Facebook?
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Is it possible that any of that information has been used by others through you?
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Okay, you're saying that when you're targeting who to advertise to, this is just done by whatever the client says— “I want someone in this region”—and absolutely none of these psychosocial profiles are being used to determine who to target ads to.
9:55 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
No, the tools we have access to through Facebook or Google already provide all of the targeting information we need with respect to an audience. With Facebook in particular, you can target based on geography, down to a postal code level. You can target an ad based on the general demographic characteristics—male, female, general age category. You can also target based on an interest category. That information is really all you need to create an advertising campaign, and that's provided to us by the client.
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Do you still have any of these scores in any of your databases?
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
You haven't kept any of either the data itself or the scores, or any of these profiles?
9:55 a.m.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
No. We're not a data company, so we have no interest in any of that.
9:55 a.m.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
You haven't shared that with anybody or transferred it?