Evidence of meeting #153 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 facebook.
A video is available from Parliament.
1 p.m.
Member, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, United Kingdom House of Commons
That means information is shared between Instagram and Facebook.
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Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
Correct. As we discussed earlier, it is important for us to be able to leverage infrastructure in order to do a lot of the things we do to try to keep people safe. Karina kind of mentioned this, although she said she didn't know if it was completely clear. Having real world identities on Facebook actually allows us to do some of the things we wouldn't be able to do with Instagram on its own to ensure we're able to get greater certainty on these questions of age, real world identity and so on. Facebook enables us to leverage some of the security systems and apply them to Instagram, because Instagram, as you obviously know, functions quite differently and has a very different set of practices in terms of how people use the service.
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Member, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, United Kingdom House of Commons
Finally, to all the platforms, if you were legally responsible for the content of your platforms, would you be able to function as businesses?
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Global Director, Information Policy, Google LLC
There are existing legal frameworks with respect to our responsibility for illegal content, which we abide by.
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Member, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, United Kingdom House of Commons
If it were possible to conduct legal actions against the separate platforms because of information that you circulated, which we knew could cause harm in the future, do you think you would be able to continue to trade or do you think that would put you out of business?
1 p.m.
Director, Public Policy, Twitter Inc.
I'm most familiar with the American context where we do have a degree of immunity. It was under the Communications Decency Act, and it was designed to give us the flexibility to implement our terms of service so that we wouldn't get sued. America is a very litigious society, as you know, and that protection has enabled us to create and maintain a much safer platform than it otherwise would be.
What you've seen across this table and across the world are many different regimes trying different mechanisms to do that. There has been independent research about the implications of that, including places where accusations were that the platforms overcorrect and squelch good speech. In the U.S. we don't often get criticisms from government to take things down because it is a violation of our hate speech or hateful conduct policy, but rather because it is a violation of copyright law, because the copyright rules in the United States are very strict, and we have to take it down within a certain period of time.
Rather than taking somebody who is critical of the government and asking them to take it down because of other terms of service, they go to the strictest regime, and that has a very negative impact on free expression.
1 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you.
We have to move on. I want to highlight what's going to happen in the next 30 minutes. We have two members of the Canadian committee who haven't spoken yet. We're going to give them five minutes each. That gives us, with the people who have asked for second questions, about 20 minutes, approximately three minutes per individual.
Again, we'll go to Mr. Graham first and Mr. Saini, and then we'll go by country.
Go ahead, Mr. Graham.
1 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you very much.
I want to get straight into this. I'm going to focus on Google and Facebook for a minute.
Do you accept the term “surveillance capitalism”, Google?
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Head, Government Affairs and Public Policy, Google Canada
I think it's an exaggeration of the situation, but it reflects social pressures and a recognition that there is an increasing worry about the data that's collected about individuals.
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Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
I cringed, I think, when I read it the first time.
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Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
You track individuals on the Internet in any way, shape or form without their knowledge or explicit consent at any time for any reason, and you do so for profit.
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Head, Government Affairs and Public Policy, Google Canada
We have a pretty clear relationship with our users about what information we collect and what we use it for. We secure consent for the information that we use.
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Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
But you don't only track information on users. You track information on anybody on the Internet. If you look at Google Analytics and any of these other services that track anybody passing through another website that has nothing to do with Google, you're collecting vastly more data than what is provided voluntarily by users. My question is, again, are you collecting data on people for profit and, if so, is that not surveillance capitalism?
1 p.m.
Head, Government Affairs and Public Policy, Google Canada
I think in the broad circumstance you just described around people using the Internet, we're not collecting information about people. We're measuring behaviour and we're measuring.... Sorry, that's the wrong term. I can hear the chuckle.
We're measuring how people act on the Internet and providing data around that, but it's not around an individual. It's around an actor.
1:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Or it's around a type of individual, an IP address or this type of information. You are collecting data that can be annexed to people. My point, and I want to take it further than that, is that governments have a tremendous surveillance capacity, as we all know. At least in this country and a lot of other countries around this table, we now have a committee of parliamentarians to oversee our security apparatus, and they go in a classified setting. They dive deeply into the intelligence agencies, what they do, how they do it and why, and they report it back.
If these committees were either created to just focus on social media companies or this committee was applied to it, what surprises would they find?
1:05 p.m.
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
Sir, as I've indicated, we want to do more than that by our actions. We're going to make all of that available and then people can...including things that are off platform. If there's a site that uses, let's say, a plug-in or something like that from Facebook, you have available all that information and you can do whatever it is you want with it. You can remove things. You can delete things. You can transfer it. You can download it. That is our commitment and we will be moving fast to get it done.
1:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
I appreciate that, but if you go into Facebook and ask it to download your data, the data that it gives you is not a comprehensive collection of what Facebook has on you as a user.
1:05 p.m.
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
Right. I think you're referring to when you download your information you get things like the photos and the videos.
1:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
You get a handful of your pictures, a handful of your updates and have a nice day.
1:05 p.m.
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
That's right. What we want to do is build...and it takes a bit of time. If you can bear with me, it takes a little bit more time to build something that's much more ambitious, which is to then give you actual control over not just the things that you put on Facebook but all the activity that you may have done with social plugs-ins elsewhere, where we can give you the ability to control and remove stuff if you so choose.
1:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
If Mark Zuckerberg were to run for president of the United States, for example, what limits his ability to use Facebook's data, machines, algorithms and collection to feed his campaign?
1:05 p.m.
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
Sir, if I may, that is a very good question, and that's precisely why we have the policies that we have in place and why we hold so steadfastly to them. It's not...and I think the question kind of came about in a different way. It was, “What if there was a photo of Mark Zuckerberg or a video of Mark Zuckerberg?” The treatment would be the same. That's because these policies have to hold regardless of the direction the wind blows.
As I said before, we understand that people may not be comfortable with the degree of transparency and the degree to which Facebook is able to make these decisions about what happens on our service, which is why we're building this external oversight board, so that these decisions, so that many of these hard precedential decisions, will not be made by Facebook alone. There will be an ability to appeal to an independent body that can make these decisions that would govern the speech on a platform.
1:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
I only have seconds, and I want to come back to the independent body in a second.
My point is, if Neil Potts runs for president of the United States and Mark Zuckerberg runs for president of the United States, I suspect that the support from Facebook and the data usage from Facebook would not be the same. On that basis, it would be very hard to say that having Mark Zuckerberg and Neil Potts here is equivalent.
1:05 p.m.
Global Policy Director, Facebook Inc.
Again, our policies are for everyone. We would not make any exceptions for anybody, which is in fact why we have these kinds of robust conversations.