Mr. Chair, and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to appear today. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you again about these important topics.
I'd also like to acknowledge that today is a particularly emotional day for Parliament. I had the good luck to spend time with Gord Brown both on and off the Hill, and I know he will be missed.
Google works hard to provide choice, transparency, control, and security for our users, and we appreciate the opportunity to tell you about how we protect Canadians and our billions of users around the world. I thought it might be a helpful context for this conversation to quickly touch on Google's presence in Canada.
For a company that is just 20 years old, we have some deep Canadian roots. Sixteen years ago, Google selected Canada as the location of its first international office. Since then, we have steadily grown to over a thousand employees in Canada, with over 600 programmers and AI researchers in Montreal, Waterloo, and Toronto. Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google services provide real benefits to Canadians, whether it's Search, Maps, Translate, Gmail, Android, Cloud, or our hardware devices, our products help people get answers, organize their information, and stay connected.
Our advertising products help Canadian businesses connect with customers around the globe, and our search tools help Canadians find information, answers, and even jobs. Just a few weeks ago, we rolled out new ways for Canadians to find jobs using Google Search.
As you may know, Google has invested significantly in Canada's burgeoning artificial intelligence ecosystem, not only through the funding of organizations like MILA in Montreal and Vector in Toronto, but also by establishing research labs that have helped Canada attract and retain world-leading talent.
Our engineers work on significant products like Gmail, the Chrome browser, and Cloud, products used by billions of people around the world. We have a Canadian team developing safe browsing technology that prevents malware attacks and phishing scams, keeping the open web safe and secure.
This brings me to how Google has long thought about privacy and security. Google has been investing in tools and teams over the past five years to provide users with industry-leading transparency, choice, and security regarding their data. We offer tools such as My Account, Security Checkup, Privacy Checkup, Takeout, Google Play Protect, and more, all with the aim of protecting users' data, allowing users to make easy and informed privacy decisions, and affording users the opportunity to easily take their data with them to other platforms.
In 2015, we launched My Account, or myaccount.google.com, which provides Canadian users with quick access to a centralized, easy-to-use tool to help manage their privacy and security. This is used extensively. There were over two billion visits globally to this tool in 2017, including tens of millions by Canadians. While we continue to promote the use of this tool, it's clear that awareness is growing and that Canadians are using it to make informed choices.
Google promotes Privacy Checkup to users on a recurring basis so we can help our users keep their privacy choices up to date as their use of Google services changes over time. Users can see the types of data Google collects, review what personal information they're sharing, and adjust the types of ads they would like Google to show them. In addition, we have a tool called Security Checkup which helps users understand what devices and apps are accessing their data.
On our Google-licensed Android platforms, we've developed Google Play Protect, which monitors devices for potentially malicious apps. We design our products and implement product policies that prioritize user privacy. It's part of our commitment to ensuring our users understand how we use data to improve their experience with Google products and services. It's hard to keep data private if it's not secure, which is part of the reason we have built such a strong security team at Google. It's also why we have not only focused on the security of Google and our services, but have helped the entire Internet industry bolster security through our leadership with projects like Safe Browsing, HTTPS Everywhere, email encryption in transit, and our leadership on promoting two-factor authentication security keys.
We know that our users are people. They are family members, friends, and neighbours. Some are relying on our products to build their company, and they're non-profit. Others just need help finding a product, an address, or opening hours, but every one of them is putting their trust in us, and we recognize the enormous value of the trust Canadians put in us.
Thank you again for the opportunity to be here today, and I look forward to answering your questions.