Information & Ethics Committee on June 12th, 2018

Evidence of meeting #113 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 know.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

Breach of personal information involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook

MPs speaking

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith

Also speaking

Jeff Silvester Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

9:50 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

Okay. On the second point, there's some similar data showing that Ripon querying data called for psychographic targeting based on high openness, extroversion, high neuroticism, and high conscientiousness. What other psychographic targeting do you do, for which clients, and on what campaigns?

9:50 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

We don't do any psychographic targeting. The information you're speaking about were scores or rankings that were provided to us by SCL for their clients.

9:50 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

This is within your Ripon....

9:50 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

Yes, I'm just about to get to that.

We created their political CRM that they call Ripon. Within that, it had the ability to display those scores or rankings that SCL created, so the client could go and look at those values. Insofar as we wrote code to allow it to be displayed to the client....

9:50 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

But you wrote the code for these values, did you not?

9:50 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

We wrote the code to display the values. We didn't find the values, or make the values, or anything like that—

9:50 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

I don't understand what that means.

You have in your code certain criteria, certain values. I'm a coder, but I just want to understand. You have certain codes or certain values that you've written into a program. Now you're saying that they didn't work or.... Explain it to me.

9:55 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

Sure.

A political CRM has a database underneath it. For that database, and certainly the empty database, we wrote code for a client to look at that database. The actual data that was in that database was provided by SCL. They told us what the values were and what they would look like. For example, with respect to that psychographic scoring, it was a number between zero and one. What we got were five columns. In each column there was usually a number between zero and one, so from zero, 0.5, 0.7....

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

Are you stating that for SCL, for this specific project, you had these values, but these values were not available in other projects?

9:55 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

They were available in the projects that we worked with SCL on. They asked us to use their Ripon tool that we wrote for them. We haven't used them anywhere else.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

Okay.

You have this code, Ripon. You have used it for other campaigns and for other clients.

9:55 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

Are you talking specifically about the Ripon code?

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

Yes, Ripon.

9:55 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

We have only used it for SCL clients.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

You have given the Ripon code to SCL, but SCL could have used it for other people.

9:55 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

After we've finished working with it, they could use it for....

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

You wrote the code with what SCL told you to write the code for, but you don't know where else it could have been used.

9:55 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

Yes. I would be surprised if I used it anywhere else.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

You would be surprised.

Why was it written in the code then. What was the purpose? Did you not have a query as to why you were writing this in the code?

9:55 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

Well, no.

We knew they were making some type of data analytics program, and they told us what—

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

You knew there was political targeting, did you not?

9:55 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

It was for politics, so yes.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

Didn't it sound odd to you that you're using psychographic profiling with this sort of...? If you look at the high-openness, extroversion, neuroticism factors, did you not find that odd? You weren't doing a psychology experiment; you were doing political work. Did you not find that odd that you were writing code? A client has asked you to write code for certain things. Did you not find that odd?

9:55 a.m.

Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ

Jeff Silvester

It's certainly new, from a political perspective.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON

This code has been used for political purposes, then.