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.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Yes, you could make as many different custom audiences as you want. The numbers of custom audiences that we've ever worked with are not in that scale or scope of size, but we certainly have used them in the past.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
In the Brexit campaign for the different leave projects, what sort of numbers of custom audiences would you have used?
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
It was the Vote Leave campaign. That's where we would have used that. I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but I can certainly get that for you.
Conservative
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
In terms of the number of custom audiences, less than 10, maybe less than 20—somewhere in that range—but I don't want you to quote me on that, because I'd have to look and see the exact number. I don't recall exactly right now, but it was not a ton.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
That would seem to be rather small value for the money that was paid, if we're talking 20,000 to 30,000 individuals in these different custom audiences.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
In terms of the money paid, the vast, vast majority of all of it went directly to the advertising. There are also reporting tools and things like that. There's our time. We did some IT work with Vote Leave as well, which we talked about when I was here last time.
With respect to the value for money, labour—because of course we were also helping them create the ads with graphic designers and this sort of thing.... So between labour and everything else, it all adds up.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
When you say you helped them create the ads, coming back to Mr. Wylie's suggestion of voter suppression in the United States and the black demographic, would you have helped customize or create those advertisements?
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
We've never run any voter suppression ads or done anything to do with voter suppression anywhere.
Conservative
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Even if I look back at all the work we've ever done, I can't even in my imagination try to stretch that to be anything close to voter suppression.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
When Mr. Wylie was with us by video link, we discussed GitLab, and Mr. Vickery's visit to the Ephemeral project—the GitLab-AIQ Ephemeral project—and discussed the database of truth, the project Saga, the project Monarch.
Recognizing that there is good humour among those who work in the digital world in your business, and the subtitle of the Ephemeral project on the website, which said, “Because there is no truth”, I asked if that was just humour, or more of an underlying reflection of the mentality at AIQ.
Mr. Wylie answered that he couldn't speak to any of “the specific intentions of AIQ and why they put certain things there”, but he said, “there was a systemic culture in the group of companies that we've been speaking about that completely disregarded the importance of truth in an election.” He said, “SCL and Cambridge Analytica regularly advertised disinformation as a service offering.”
Are you saying you weren't aware of that: offering a disinformation service?
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
We don't conduct ourselves to provide disinformation; we provide information. All of the advertising we do is clearly attached to the clients we do the advertising for. We're not trying to hide any of that. All of that information has been provided to the different regulators and, indeed, to different committees. They're going to do the work that they need do to ensure that it was all within the limits, but none of the advertising we've ever seen and none of the work we've ever done for any of our clients would come close to the type of description of what Mr. Wylie was saying.
With respect to the Ephemeral project, that particular comment was just a comment by one of our staff. With regard to that particular project, the comment is making reference to—and I talked about this at the DCMS committee—the fact that, when you have multiple databases that have potentially the same information in them, if you're going to put those back together at some point, you need to know which one is in charge. It's like a parent-child relationship in data. That database of truth is a comment that one is always the most right one. If you ever have a conflict like there's a phone number over here, and there's a phone number there, we're trying to put together which one is right. The comment is that that particular server is the one that's going to be found to be right.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
Do you think that that comment isn't particularly helpful as people become familiar with the illegal harvesting of Facebook information and the way it was used by Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit campaigns and in the United States? You mentioned in your opening remarks that a lot of this discussion has been wildly speculative. Certainly reference to those sorts of individual findings, which, as you say, may have been innocent in their origin, doesn't reflect particularly well to people who believe that there was a cynical attempt to interfere with the democratic process.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
First, the comment itself is perhaps not a perfect representation of what it is, but we are working with our developers to be a little better on that. Second, we never used any of the information from Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, or anyone else in that that was improperly obtained during Brexit, and Facebook has confirmed that.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Nathaniel Erskine-Smith
Thanks very much.
We move to Mr. Saini for five minutes.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
Good morning, Mr. Silvester.
There are two points I want to raise. One, in response to Mr. Erskine-Smith the last time your were here, you said, “We don't have data to profile and target, and we don't profile and target individuals”. I just picked up on what Mr. Kent said about suppressing the vote.
Chris Vickery uncovered evidence that, in the Ripon voter querying data, there's an option value for “disengagement target”. I have a copy of it here, and I think he's posted it on his Twitter. Can you please explain what this means and how your past statement can be accurate in light of this information?
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
In the context, that was during the presidential primary campaign. A disengagement target is the people whom you just don't want to talk to. For example, if you're campaigning, and you know there's a street full of hard-core Conservatives, you're just not going to bother knocking on those doors, and that's who the disengagement targets are. It's a list that you can use so that when, for example, you're making a mailing list to send out mailers to people, you can then take out the people who you know are never going to vote for you because they're hard-core Conservatives or, in the case of the primary campaigns, they're extreme Democrats or something like this.
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
The disengagement target was to eliminate data; it was not to provide them other information to suppress the vote or to turn the voting? They were eliminated from any of the advertising you were doing.
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Not all of the advertising, but specifically, they would be eliminated from lists that campaign had.
Liberal
Liberal
Raj Saini Liberal Kitchener Centre, ON
You've stated here it's a disengagement. You just told me that those are people you want to avoid, and you used the example that, if you know there are Conservatives on the street, you wouldn't bother with them. If I know there are Conservatives on the street, what am I going to target to them?
Chief Operating Officer, AggregateIQ
Exactly. When you're doing a list that you might match for advertising, if you're going door to door, or if you're doing a mailer or anything where you would be directly communicating with an individual, then yes, you would exclude those people, but with respect to general demographic advertising or geographic advertising, you might still show them ads. You never know who those people are because it's all just through Facebook, Google, or whatever.