I received this letter last night at 11 o'clock, and I haven't had a chance to get it translated into our two official languages. It's very clear to me that we do not present documents unless they're in both official languages, but I would like to present it to the committee so that it can be shared. It was written to Chair Zimmer and Vice-Chair Erskine-Smith, as well as me, from Mike Baukes, co-CEO of UpGuard in Mountain View, California, as well as Greg Pollock, and Jon Hendren, their director of strategy.
I'm not going to read the whole letter, but there are key elements to put on the record, especially as Mr. Collins is here. It says:
We at UpGuard are reaching out to you, honorable chair and vice chairs of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics, regarding an important matter of privacy and data integrity affecting not just Canadian citizens, but individuals around the world. The issue of preserving any and all relevant data stored by companies AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, and SCL on the systems of external services, including but not limited to Github, and Amazon Web Services, is a matter of great urgency and public significance.
It goes on to say:
The news today that Cambridge Analytica and SCL are being dissolved raises a serious concern: is there more data out there, hosted using services such as AWS, that is relevant to inquiries in the US, UK, and Canada into all three companies?
We write to you in the hopes that public servants might immediately put forward data preservation requests to GitHub, Amazon Web Services, Facebook, and other relevant data services, to freeze and preserve the data in any accounts used by AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, and SCL.
It continues:
We hope these data preservation requests would be made public, as ultimately the directors for all of these companies should be held accountable. We fear that if the proverbial paper trail is wiped, important information could be lost of interest to the relevant international inquiries.
The risk is that one cluster of companies have the keys to all of this data, yet turns a blind eye to all of the egregious uses of their platform without governance nor controls in place for transparency or oversight into their operations. It would compound the potential issues under investigation were this data to now disappear with the dissolution of Cambridge Analytica and SCL
They've listed a series of questions they're asking us to consider, and they would be eager to discuss this matter with any Canadian or international officials.
I will present the letter to the committee, and we can have it properly translated so that everyone has a copy.