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.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Zackary Massingham  Chief Executive Officer, AggregateIQ
Jeff Silvester  Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

10 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

Were you a staffer or a volunteer?

10 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

I was a staffer for a member of Parliament, but once he moved on with Ignatieff's office, I knew he was there but I didn't work directly with him. With respect to the further work that he did, I was aware that he was doing some work for them, but we weren't working with him, nor do I know the exact content of what he was doing.

10 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

Okay.

Does AIQ have a publicly available mission statement or a statement available to clients, past or prospective, which states exactly where the line is drawn in terms of acceptable data processing, or delivery of advertisements, or work to affect the outcomes of elections?

10 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

After the work in Nigeria, where we encountered that video that we talked about earlier, we did put in place some new language into our standard contract that talked about the ethics and morality of the particular videos and giving us the final say in what we would run or not run.

10 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

It's not explicit; it's more per occasion. If you come upon something that you find ethically unacceptable, you draw the line with that client.

10 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

10 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

We've been talking about servers and working on client servers or your own servers. How many servers do you have and are they all in Canada? How many are there at AIQ?

10 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

How many do we control?

10 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

Yes.

10 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

We don't own our own servers. We use cloud service providers—right now, a lot. Every project has its own server. It has development servers. There are test servers and things for the code. You know about our code repository. I don't know the exact number, but I'd say there's quite a number of servers that we control, sir. We don't own them. They're Amazon web services typically, but they're servers that we control.

10 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

Right.

Has either the British Columbia or the federal privacy commissioner asked to access your servers or the content of those servers in their respective investigations?

10 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

We've been co-operating with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia, and, indeed, we suggested that we go and meet with them and talk to them about all of the work. They've asked us lots of questions and we've provided all the answers. They followed up again just when we came here and, of course, we'll be responding to them very shortly. In the latest letter, they've asked us a number of things that I haven't had a chance to address, so I couldn't say accurately if they've asked for that. Previously, though, they've asked us about the information that we hold, but not for the specific information that we hold.

10 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

They haven't yet asked...?

10 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

They may have in their most recent communications, but I have not spent the time because it was just as we were arriving, so I haven't spent the time unfortunately to look at that yet.

10 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

Sure.

Can you tell us why the British privacy commissioner, Denham, formerly the privacy commissioner of British Columbia, is on record as saying that AggregateIQ has not been particularly helpful in her investigation?

10 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

I don't know why she would say that. As I said, we received a letter on May 17, 2017. We responded in about a week and offered to answer any other questions or provide any clarification, if we could. Then we didn't hear from her again until January 30, 2018. I don't know how answering her questions and responding promptly constitutes not being co-operative.

10 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

Have you been requested to appear at hearings in the U.K., either parliamentary or with respect to privacy, or in the United States before Congress?

10 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

We've not been asked with respect to privacy or anywhere in the United States, but we did get a request from the U.K. Parliament to appear at a committee not dissimilar from this one.

10:05 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

And has that taken place?

10:05 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

It's in the future, so we're going to be following up with them in this coming week to schedule that.

10:05 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON

Okay, thank you.

10:05 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer

Thank you, Mr. Kent.

Next up for seven minutes is Mr. Angus.

10:05 a.m.

NDP

Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON

Thank you, Chair.

Brittany Kaiser testified this past week in the U.K., and she said, “when I joined [Cambridge Analytica]...AggregateIQ was our exclusive digital and data-engineering partner”.

Mr. Massingham, is that correct?

10:05 a.m.

Chief Executive Officer, AggregateIQ

Zackary Massingham

I can't speak to that.

10:05 a.m.

NDP

Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON

Is it correct? Can you say it's no or...?