Evidence of meeting #117 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 vote.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Okay. Would you have a problem giving us the corporate structure of AggregateIQ so that we can verify these?
Chief Executive Officer, AggregateIQ
As I said, I'll provide that to you.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Great.
What role did Chris Shannon play in the Brexit campaign with BeLeave or Vote Leave?
Chief Executive Officer, AggregateIQ
He was a developer, and only for Vote Leave. He had no part in BeLeave.
Chief Executive Officer, AggregateIQ
Me, Jeff Silvester and Mr. Shannon.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Okay. Do you know if Mr. Shannon has read the reports from the U.K. Information Commissioner and the Electoral Commission?
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Okay, but as CEO....
Before we go, I just want to.... I'm very confused about this issue that in six days a million dollars Canadian went through the BeLeave campaign. The commission is clear. It said that BeLeave did not go on to run any ads, and you said you were running ads. They said that this was a money-laundering vehicle to circumvent the law.
If you were running ads, were you running Vote Leave's ads with the money from BeLeave?
Chief Executive Officer, AggregateIQ
No.
All ad budgets were kept separate. All ad accounts were kept separate. Their money was their own.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you, Mr. Angus.
We're going to go to a new round here, starting with Ms. Vandenbeld.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Thank you very much.
I'm very concerned about the fact that you make certain statements in your testimony and then, when evidence is provided that those statements are not correct, you alter those statements but you're still not particularly forthcoming on this.
For example, when I asked Mr. Silvester about the psychosocial profiles that were used on whom to target the ads to, and whether AIQ still had any of those data or scores in their databases, he said, “We're not a data company, so we have no interest in any of that.”
Now, the U.K. Information Commissioner's office has actually issued an enforcement notice asking you to stop handling the data of U.K. citizens, so clearly we know that you are handling data. Today you said that there was data from SCL, but you have absolutely no idea what the source of that data is.
Are you or were you in possession of large amounts of data that include some form of information, rankings or other information, that was derived from the Facebook breaches?
Chief Executive Officer, AggregateIQ
To say that they were derived from Facebook breaches, I could not be certain.
I know that SCL worked with a number of data vendors and did its own modelling to create a dataset that would be used within the Ripon platform itself.
On the matter of ICO's unfortunate notice, the only data that was there was something akin to a thousand email addresses—no scores, nothing else like that. It might be a name and the email address, and that was it. Just for your understanding of that, none of that had anything to do with any referendum client.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
I want to go back to what your business model is, because if all you're doing is taking email addresses, putting it on Facebook and targeting ads, you're basically taking a million dollars and you're being paid just to put ads on Facebook, which is something any intern could probably do.
Now, today, it's been proven and the U.K. says that there were no ads placed for BeLeave. I heard you say earlier, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you instructed Facebook to return the money.
Chief Executive Officer, AggregateIQ
That was going back to a previous point in time where we were with SCL during the U.S. mid-terms. SCL had provided an advertising budget for their clients. The ad budget wasn't able to be spent during the campaign period, and SCL had requested that we send the money back.
So what we had asked was that Facebook, since we sent the money back to SCL—