Information & Ethics Committee on Feb. 5th, 2019

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

We'll come back. We'll have time after.

Next up for seven minutes is Mr. Cullen.

Thank you for coming back and gracing us with your presence again in committee. It's good to have you back.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

You can decide after my round of questioning whether it was a graceful presence, but thank you, Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for being here.

There's a lot I want to explore, but the time is limited so I'll try to keep it tight and bright and follow the chain of events of, say, the interference or the attempted corruption—or successful corruption—of the U.S. election and the Brexit vote.

You talked about accountability, Mr. Kint, in your last piece. Does the chain start with access, illegal or otherwise, to the databases that parties hold on citizens? Parties collect an enormous amount of information about voters, voting intent and location, potentially income and preferences, and that information, once hacked—because there was not sufficient security there—was then allowed to be weaponized through the social media platforms. You talked, in your last comment, about accountability toward Facebook.

This is a life-threatening event for that company. Trust is important to any company, particularly social media. What has the response been like since that line was proven, the hack of the DNC and the Republicans, the targeted lies that were then spread through that election, and Facebook not being accountable to its users for its security?

[Jason Kint]

From our perspective it's been very disappointing. I sent a letter on behalf of our association to Mr. Zuckerberg in November 2016 around the time of the election, asking for what we described as “moonshots”, saying that it was that big a problem. They clearly have some of the best engineering minds in the world and enormous resources to solve issues like this.

We've been very disappointed. It's been more of a PR strategy than anything, and it seems as though in the last few months it's shifted even more aggressively toward that.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Toward PR?

[Jason Kint]

Toward PR and criticizing the media and anybody who's trying to hold them accountable.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Okay, that's what I'm looking for, because every company has a culture and this is this company's description of its culture, of having been exposed in a major way.

Recently this government came out with a strategy to combat fake news in our next election, which is just eight or nine months away. When we got down to the part of the plan that dealt with social media, the words “hope” and “expectations” were there but no requirements of social media platforms.

I don't know if you watched any of that announcement, either Mr. Carroll or Mr. Kint, just in terms of what social media has to step up to do in order to keep Canadians protected from foreign or other interference. Is it enough to just hope and expect groups like Facebook and Google to do the right thing when it comes to protecting data, not allowing fake news to be weaponized, targeting voters, misdirecting their votes, misdirecting their intentions?

[Jason Kint]

From my perspective, particularly with Facebook, we're past that, and that's where I'm hopeful that the FTC steps in and enforces the consent decree. It's on probation from seven or eight years ago.

For many of the issues you led your question with, including the way the political parties use the data, we need to go way further upstream to the actual collection and use of the data. That's where it sits with Facebook. I can give you another 10 symptoms of the problem, from bots and ad fraud to users installing ad blocking because they don't even want to see ads. I can give you a whole list of ways it's affecting my world, but those are all symptoms of the problem. Even disinformation is a symptom of a problem, and the problem is the data collection at a pervasive level across the web. That needs to be restricted for companies that have the access to most of the activity that happens.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Now you're challenging their very business model. That is what they're in the business of—data collection and then the marketing of that data, which is highly valuable. What did you say? It's a $150 billion ad market industry across—

[Jason Kint]

Yes, across the U.S. and North America, and 85% of the growth is going to two companies whose business is data collection.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

That's based on data collection.

[Jason Kint]

Yes, one of the things that's most challenging, going back to their strategy, is that you'll hear Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg both make the point that this is their business and this is the way it works. If not, everybody is going to have to pay for the product, and 2.3 billion people around the world are going to have to pay for it, including in developing nations.

There are steps that can be taken in between that hold them to a higher bar in which they make a little less money.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Let's talk about that higher bar.

Mr. Carroll, I don't know if you can comment on this or not. I think this committee made the suggestion that political parties, which also collect a lot of data, should be held to the privacy standards that private companies are held to. That is not the case in the government's new election bill. The Chief Electoral Officer was out yesterday saying he was very disappointed that this was not included.

Do you think it should be included in Canadian law?

[David Carroll]

Yes, I think that's a bold but necessary step. I commented on that earlier, that I admire the audacity of taking that position.

One thing that got lost in the story is that it was illegal to create political profiles of Americans, according to U.K. law. There was a big debate over whether psychometrics worked or not, and that was a red herring to the unlawful profiling, according to U.K. law. In many ways it seems that the directors of Cambridge Analytica/SCL misunderstood the jurisdictional question. The higher-order question is: why did this business become internationalized? Why was U.S. voter data processed in another country?

I think the first issue at play here is around how we can keep voter data inside the countries of the voters as an initial way to protect it.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Do you mean the political parties preventing it from being hacked in the first place?

[David Carroll]

Sure. How could a political party even justify hiring a foreign company to work on their campaign? How is that even acceptable?

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

This government let a contract to Cambridge Analytica for $100,000. That isn't much money, but we don't know what the intent or purpose of the contract was. Then the scandal broke, and we still don't know.

We're looking for lessons learned—these very difficult, painful lessons learned in the U.S., in the U.K., in France and Germany. We're on the cusp of our next election. What would you suggest is the most important of those painful lessons learned that Canada must pick up now? The election cycle is now. We are turning our minds towards a vote in October. What would you cite as number one?

[David Carroll]

Within the given infrastructure that's here, how can campaigns and vendors be scrutinized by citizens, civil society, academia and the government itself? If the business of this political engine feels as if it is being scrutinized, that's the best we can hope for in terms of their being on their best behaviour. But moving forward, there are fundamental changes that need to happen.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Cullen. We will have time at the end, I'm sure, to ask all the questions that need to be asked. I presume that, but we have lots to ask.

Next up, for seven minutes, is Mr. Baylis.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

With these behemoths—Facebook and Google—two things have happened. You mentioned one, Mr. Kint, which is the profit. There's a phenomenal profit, but they get that profit by making use of copyright that does not belong to them. They take a music video they know I'll like, and they show it to me. They'll put an ad beside it, and they'll keep the money; the musician gets nothing. Or they'll take a wonderful photo that was captured by a photographer who could have sold it to newspapers and such before. They'll take it, digitize it, and then someone will look for that photo. The company takes it and profits.

They do it to journalists, to writers, musicians, artists—all types. I'm not searching for any content that Google's made. I'm not interested. Facebook doesn't make any content.

I want to talk about the money, the profit motive, first of all. They've been protected by something called “safe harbour”, which means they can say, “Hey, you wanted to see this. I just showed it to you. I'm clean here.” Here in Canada, for example, many of our media outlets are suffering tremendously. They've lost all their ad revenue as well. It doesn't mean that people aren't reading their newspaper articles. They are reading them, but they're reading them through a Google aggregate or something like that, and again, Google's taking the profit.

Do you see a way for Canada to deal with that? If not Canada alone, should we be working with our allies to say that's enough profiteering off of all these people? That's what's given this phenomenal power.

[Jason Kint]

Yes. You have a number of recommendations in your report that will start to address the problem. We've talked a lot about the data piece: limiting their use of data, because that's where the value is coming from. As soon as you put a constraint on that, it restricts that profit.

There are very interesting developments, particularly in Europe, around copyright, and it seems they are moving forward again as of yesterday. I'd study those. They've been through a lot of the difficult balancing between copyright and free speech protection.

Yes, there are opportunities there. In your report, some of the evidence that Tristan Harris and a few others provided looked at ways to hold them liable for when they make recommendations. That is interesting to me, when we start to talk about not just links to the content but then using their AI to present recommendations. We have to actually put some liability on them. The real reason they're making money is that they have no liability for anything, but at the same time they get all the money. When there's a problem, it's not their problem; it's the Internet's problem or it's society's problem.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Chris, do you have any thoughts on that?

[Chris Vickery]

An original seed of corruption in this whole problem is the concept of micro-targeting. There is something to be said for having an Internet and index and aggregated sources and all that stuff that is useful for looking things up. We've always had phone books and things of that nature, but typically they were the same for everybody. When I look at the Mona Lisa, I don't have a personalized version of it coming to me that I find more attractive compared with the person next me. It is a human experience to experience what everybody else is experiencing.

When you throw in micro-targeting, you up the ante on how much this data is worth and how much you can squeeze out of—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

You're talking about their ability to use the data to micro-target.

Let me talk another way about how they collect data.

The minute I buy my iPhone and say, “I agree to the terms of use”, I click it or I go into Google and I've implicitly agreed to do something, which is to spy on me. I don't want Apple spying on me for last year, even though they make the argument that it's necessary. That's not true. It's a lie; it's not necessary. I have had no power to go and negotiate my terms of use.

Would it be a good idea if we were to mandate what they can and can't do in terms of their ability to collect the data? That doesn't mean everybody will follow it, but for people like Google and Facebook, if the penalties are large enough for breaking that law, we could use their terms of use and say, “Whatever you put your terms of use on, this is contractually what you can and can't do for Canadians.”

I'd like to hear from all three of you on that. Maybe we'll start with you, Mr. Carroll.

[David Carroll]

It would be really interesting to create incentives for the industry to realign itself towards non-personal data and away from personal data.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I'm talking about the government mandating it. I don't care what you do: you're not allowed to do this, you're not allowed to do that. Whatever you think you're allowed to do.... Right now you're allowed to do anything.