Information & Ethics Committee on Sept. 25th, 2018

[Prof. Fenwick McKelvey]

I spoke about principally three things that I thought the committee hadn't heard before. The scope of this matter is something that's been quite daunting for anybody in communication studies. It's as though everything is all in one basket all at once, and what are the million different things you've studied over the past 10 years that you might pull out?

We've been trying to move fairly quickly on making recommendations. I think there has been a lot of movement on ads and ad transparency. I certainly think that more inquiry into the ad market is not necessarily hard to do. It's very evident that there's a problem there.

I think the question of other steps is one that has come up in a roundabout way. There's the question of content moderation. One of the fallacies that we have is that social media platforms are unregulated, but really we have a whole host of varying levels of rules that are more or less transparent that are filtering all content. A lot of that is for illegal content, but there have also been concerns about, for example, women's breastfeeding groups on Facebook being censored.

I think one of the steps that I and my colleagues Chris Tenove and Heidi Tworek are talking about is having a social media council, similar to a broadcasting standards council, so that you can start coordinating this kind of grey area of content moderation, which is increasingly what platforms do, and I think is largely an intractable problem. To echo Ben Scott's point, I don't think we're going to solve this thing. I think it's about developing those institutions that can maintain that.

Third, I think this code of conduct is something that really should have been done. There's reluctance by the party to do it. I'm frustrated that there haven't been any takeaways when this is something that we've been talking about for months. At some point it's not my deadline. I would hope there would be some more movement on that.

Finally, there have been discussions about Bill C-76 and privacy, and the government has stated that it's not moving forward on putting political parties under privacy law. I think that's a real shortcoming. I think it's a very easy fix, and we see it being effective in B.C.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

As the chair indicated with regard to the Canadian political parties, their invitations will be going out. The parties, we hope, will respond and address some of these issues.

In the case of the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-AggregateIQ scandal, there was an awful lot of finger pointing back and forth about where the data came from and who got it. AggregateIQ said that they didn't know where the data came from, that they didn't do anything wrong, and that all they did was package it and buy advertising.

To your point about data brokers, there would also seem to be in this area a certain amount of plausible deniability about the source of the data if a party or an advertiser or anyone bought data to send a message or to buy a product or to support a political party. Do you believe there should be regulation of the data brokers in terms of how and where they acquired that information?

[Prof. Fenwick McKelvey]

I think one point is about clarifying the mandate of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and extending their enforcement powers to potentially have more effectiveness. I don't know if it would necessarily be new regulation or just clarifying what we have already. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has commissioned a report on data brokers. I think one of the twists that are important is that when I look at AggregateIQ and particularly the allegations that it was collecting data in Trinidad and Tobago and then moving that abroad, I think there are these questions about how we coordinate these as international players. That was my comment, that these data brokers are global. The data broker market in Canada isn't as large, according to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, as might be the one in the United States.

I think it's in one sense realizing that our privacy laws do have some effect on that. Also it's to start thinking about how we begin to transition from collecting personal information to then thinking about these data protection laws and about how we're putting those combinations together, and how much transparency there is in that. I think there is clear need for that.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Very briefly, because time is precious here, to Mr. Owen and to Mr. Scott, what are your thoughts on the reality that the digital universe is without borders? When the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, was brought in in Europe, we saw that quite a number of large American news organizations began blocking access from Europe because they weren't sure whether or not they would actually be breaking these new laws in those jurisdictions.

What are your thoughts on this current situation in which the GDPR has one set of very stringent regulations but the rest of the world is without?

[Prof. Taylor Owen]

I would just say that I think we're seeing the emergence of three competing regulatory regimes: a European regulatory regime that's in many ways articulated through GDPR but also through other provisions; an American regime, now largely unregulated in structure, that supports the dominance of current American-based platform companies; and a Chinese governance model that is building and providing tools that provide a much higher degree of surveillance and monitoring capacity than any other tools available. I think there's an opportunity for a fourth. There's a demand globally for something different from those three regimes, but if Canada is not going to provide it, then I think we have to pick one of those regimes. This idea that we can sit between Europe and America on this issue is unsustainable.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thanks.

We'll move on to Mr. Masse.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

That's an interesting point to pick up on. One of my biggest concerns in this, and I propose a digital bill of rights, is that we seem to be seeking, or at least some do, to put the genie back in the bottle.

I can tell you that as a New Democrat I've had many reporters come to me and tell me from their paper that they won't cover me because their editorial will not cover an NDP member. I've been doing this for 15 years federally, and for five years on municipal council prior to that. We have streams, layers, screens in the mainstream media. It is exciting for the Internet to be used as a different vehicle to actually reach people through different messaging, and it has had an impact.

I had a bill on motor vehicle owners' right to repair in the automotive aftermarket. It got limited coverage because the advertisers had a very lucrative relationship with the automotive companies. This is a provision that was done in the United States for aftermarket repairs. Over in Canada, you were directly competing in messaging against those who have a financial interest in the distribution of commercials and advertising, which is quite lucrative.

I am intrigued, though, by the disclosure of transparency that's being proposed, and maybe I could get some further comment on that. I will leave this open to all of the members. We could see it as similar to drug coverage. When advertisers ask you to prescribe yourself a drug on TV or whatever, there's a disclaimer. We know that SNL and others have done famous comedy sketches where they run the side effects for nausea. Is that a model or is it a potential element?

I'll conclude with this. The use of telecommunications in the airwaves and the airspace is a public infrastructure that we lease out. It is ours and we own it like the land we have. We pay for the devices, the fees, and the services to actually get this information to us and our families. They're often infected or contaminated by others, who attack it through malware and other types of phishing and other things, so I believe there's a high responsibility on those who are perpetrating this type of information. How we would enhance the transparency from the perspective I have is that we should at least have some rights on this issue because we've created the system for this distribution of information.

[Dr. Ben Scott]

If I could, maybe I'll jump in on that point.

I think transparency is the clearest set of recommendations that we have, and a number of ideas have been floated.

I published a paper yesterday that I could draw your attention to. It's called “Digital Deceit II”. It is the second in the series. The first was on ad tech; this one is on policy recommendations.

There's a very specific recommendation for ad transparency in that paper. Essentially what it says is that when you get an ad on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, when you put your finger over that ad if it's on your phone, or you hover your cursor over that ad if it's on your desktop, it ought to pop up a little box that tells you a lot more information about that ad: who bought the ad; how much they paid for it; how many people have seen it besides you; and, most importantly, why you got that ad—what the demographic features were that were chosen by the advertiser to make that ad come to you. If you got that ad because the advertiser somehow has your email address or your phone number, they should have to say that too. When I have all that information, I realize, “Wow—I'm going to view this piece of information a lot more critically.”

Our study shows us that a lot of people don't even realize the difference between an ad and organic content, non-paid content.

I think those ads should have a big red box around them so you know they're ads. “I'm going to put my finger over that. I want to see more about why I got that.”

This is directly analogous to how we treat broadcast advertising or pharmaceutical advertising. We have a public interest responsibility for transparency, and we provide for that in the law. There's no reason we can't do that in digital. The companies could do this tomorrow if they wanted to.

The other piece is that all the politicalized ads that come up on Facebook or Twitter or Google ought to be in a database that is publicly accessible. With a lot of political ads, there are a thousand different versions of that ad, and they're microtargeted at small groups of people. Sometimes there are contradictory messages and they're just hoping that no one will notice they're advertising two different things to two different groups. You could never do that on television—you'd get busted in a second—but you can do it in Facebook with no problem.

The Trump campaign was a master at this. We need that database to be accessible to journalists and researchers through a very simple API so that everybody can get access to that data and look at it and understand how political propaganda is working. It's not that it's all illegitimate, only that we ought to know what's happening and how people are trying to influence our views.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Does anybody else have a comment?

[Prof. Taylor Owen]

I agree completely with both elements of that. That really is the first and easiest step in the lead-up to in the next election.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Go ahead, Mr. McKelvey.

[Prof. Fenwick McKelvey]

I do want to caution that.... I think transparency is quite important. I think there also is a need to start talking about the limits of where you can advertise and how you can advertise. This is why I think the bill of rights is kind of interesting. You were starting to stipulate what can and can't be done and shifting some of the responsibility off consumers, who I think are in a taxed information environment, and putting it on the responsibility of companies.

I think one of the telling lessons for me was that both Facebook and Google have exited from providing advertisements for cryptocurrencies, and Google in particular has stopped providing ads for opioid treatment centres because they are too difficult to regulate.

I think what we need to say is that these ad markets are already being policed in ways and that we need to have more transparency about how they work. I think it's not simply about transparency for the user, but also greater accountability about how these ads are being sold and managed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

You have about 10 seconds.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Quickly, can government set an example by going first with putting the standards on themselves and then bringing the private sector in right after that?

[Prof. Taylor Owen]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Ben Scott]

Yes.

[Prof. Fenwick McKelvey]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Wow, three answers in three seconds. That's pretty good.

Next up, for seven minutes, is Mr. Erskine-Smith.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thanks very much.

Thanks for presenting today.

In June, we tabled an interim report with specific recommendations, and I want to make sure we're on the same page. You would all agree with strengthening the powers of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. Is that fair to say?

[Prof. Fenwick McKelvey]

Yes.

[Dr. Ben Scott]

Yes.

[Prof. Taylor Owen]

Yes.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

You've all spoken today about better regulation of political activities with respect to privacy. I want to drill down on that so that when we get to a final report, we maybe have some more specific recommendations.

When we talk about elections and ad transparency, both Mr. Owen and Mr. Scott, you've delineated in different papers an exact way of looking at this. There's the searchable database on Facebook, where a political actor like myself would post content. That content should be searchable, presumably, if I'm sponsoring it.

Would that make sense?

[Dr. Ben Scott]

That database already exists if you're an American Facebook user.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Yes, although I understood from speaking to some folks in the States that it was not so easily searchable and requirements should be imposed on its searchability.