Evidence of meeting #155 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 apple.
A video is available from Parliament.
Vice-President, Global Policy, Trust and Security, Mozilla Corporation
—and this is where we as companies need the help of government when nation states are attacking companies.
Senior Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of National Development, Parliament of Singapore
You used the term earlier about having guardrails.
Vice-President, Global Policy, Trust and Security, Mozilla Corporation
Yes.
Senior Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of National Development, Parliament of Singapore
I think that's important to prevent all of us from dropping into the abyss of disinformation.
Vice-President, Global Policy, Trust and Security, Mozilla Corporation
Agreed.
Senior Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of National Development, Parliament of Singapore
Thank you.
Chair, thank you.
Conservative
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
To change the topic a little, in your opening remarks, Mr. Davidson, you talked about the fact that your company's workforce is focusing more on diversity. We know and we've heard testimony that algorithms are influenced by the social biases of those who are programming them, so if most of the programmers are young 20-something males, their social bias will be perpetrated through the algorithms.
How important is it that the workforce be diversified? How are you doing that, and what impact is it having?
Vice-President, Global Policy, Trust and Security, Mozilla Corporation
We think it's extremely important. It's essential not just because it's the right thing to do—and it is the right thing to do—but also because our argument is we all will build better products if we have a more diverse workforce that reflects the broader base of the communities we serve.
It's been a big struggle in Silicon Valley, in the tech industry generally, and I think we all should acknowledge that. We constantly need to work on it.
We've made it a very big priority in our company. As an example, every executive in our company has goals for the year. We call them objectives and key results. We all set our own, but one is mandatory for everybody: How well did you do in diversity in your hiring? It adds that little extra push to know you're being graded on it.
We need to do more of that, and we will be the first to say we have a way to go. I think we've probably made a lot of progress in gender diversity, particularly within our technical community. We've done less well and still have a long way to go on other kinds of ethnic diversity, and we are really working on it.
Vice-President, Global Policy, Trust and Security, Mozilla Corporation
Thank you for raising it.
Liberal
Anita Vandenbeld Liberal Ottawa West—Nepean, ON
Could I ask the other platforms to each comment on that aspect?
National Technology Officer, Microsoft Canada Inc.
At Microsoft, Satya Nadella has made it a top priority, and we recognize that our decisions and our products are better if our company better reflects the communities we serve.
Here in Canada, we're working to have Microsoft Canada reflect the cultural mosaic that Canada has, which includes not only gender but ethic backgrounds and orientation. Also, for those people who have unique adaptive requirements and unique work styles, such as visual challenges or hearing challenges or perhaps mental attention challenges....
Really, we're creating that community, and we build that into our AI ethics program. We have a governance committee that looks at sensitive uses of AI, but then we convene a very diverse community to do a 360° view of that sensitive use. We want very explicitly to have that cross-sectional perspective from every person in the organization who has a comment and to represent, again, that cultural mosaic. That way, we feel we can address some of those potential unintended consequences up front and be able to provide advice and guidance going forward.
Manager of User Privacy, Apple Inc.
Diversity is one of the four corporate values that our CEO Tim Cook has espoused, in addition to privacy. They're both quite important. It goes far beyond AI. Certainly speaking from a privacy dimension, it's very much about the human condition, and having a diversity of viewpoints will help us make good choices.
I don't have the numbers at hand about how our diversity is today. I'm sure we still have a long way to go. We have taken steps not only to improve our hiring and our outreach in terms of bringing diverse people into the workforce, but also in taking a look at churn, or career longevity. It's one thing to get somebody in the door, but you also want to make sure they have a productive and fulfilling career experience to stay and continue contributing.
As I said, we have more work to do on both of those dimensions.
Director, Security Engineering, Office of the Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com
You'll hear a similar story from Amazon. We place a big focus on diversity. It's a big part of our corporate goals, and hiring managers and executives are given specific goals in that area.
Of course, it's not just a matter of hiring. It's also a matter of career longevity, career management and creating communities of interest within our company that allow people to feel both integrated into the larger organization and to have communities of interest that they feel very much at home in.
We do a lot of work across all those areas to increase the diversity of the business. Again, we think that's best for business. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it will help us to build better products, because the diverse backgrounds of our employees will match the customers we're trying to serve.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Bob Zimmer
Thank you, Ms. Vandenbeld.
I have an explanation of what's going to happen. We have a few more comments, and then we're going to have some final closing comments of the IGC from our vice-chairs, my co-chair and then me. Then we'll be done. It might go a little past 11:30, but it will be very close.
I have Mr. Kent for five minutes.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
If I could come back to the topic of competition, antitrust and monopolies in the new marketplace, there's been a lot of discussion recently, particularly in the United States, about the new digital monopolies and the fact that they may be a lot more durable than monopolies in the past—the railroads, the phone companies and so forth. They can overwhelm competition by either buying it or destroying it.
Yesterday I quoted, to the Facebook representative who was before us, the writings of Chris Hughes, the disillusioned former co-founder of Facebook. I know there's been some suggestion from some of our panellists today that their companies may be willing to accept versions of the European legislation, but one of Mr. Hughes' headlines suggests that Facebook should, in fact, be broken up and be subject to antitrust application. He said, “Facebook isn't afraid of a few more rules. It's afraid of an antitrust case”.
I know the defence against antitrust prosecution is a little more difficult because your big data monopolies use the excuse that your service is free and that there's not a tangible or identifiable dollar cost to what consumers are buying.
Again, this question may be greater than your job descriptions allow, which is why we asked that CEOs be present with us today, but I wonder, particularly in the case of Amazon and Microsoft, if you could discuss your companies' views with regard to countering these growing antitrust discussions and calls for breakup in the interests of greater competition and greater consumer protection.
I'll start with Mr. Ryland.
Director, Security Engineering, Office of the Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com
I'd be happy to say a few words about that.
Again, our business model is very traditional. We're selling goods and services—they have monetary value—both in our retail Amazon.com business and our cloud computing business, and we are facing robust competition across all kinds of different services and platforms that are not limited to online. There's a vast variety of channels and mechanisms that people use to acquire IT services, whether it be for a cloud or other kinds of capabilities. It's just a very different business model from our perspective, and our use of data to enhance the consumer experience is, we believe, very much adding value for consumers, and they really enjoy the experience of using these technologies.
I think it's a very different approach to some of the issues that you raise. Again, that's kind of a high-level statement, and beyond that, in terms of specifics around competition law, I've already disclosed that I'm not an expert.
Again, I think our business model is very traditional in that regard, so I think it's a bit different.
National Technology Officer, Microsoft Canada Inc.
I think that as you look at our longevity since the seventies, we've seen ebbs and flows. We used to have a phone. We have a great browser, but it has undergone a number of revisions. The vision of having a PC on every desktop has now changed to a phone in every pocket. We see these ebbs and flows that move through the environment.
As for the consumer data environment, consumers will go to services that are popular to them, and they will have ebbs and flows. Certainly if you speak with millennials today, the millennials are off in different places. For example, my children, who are kind of in that space, although they'll disagree that they're millennials, will say, “Dad, I'm not there, so don't talk to me on that channel—talk to me on this channel.” These things ebb and flow.
The data then lends itself to algorithms. We see an algorithmic age coming, and people using algorithms as a monetization technique. We see a move from algorithms to APIs and people monetizing APIs.
What we have is this continual innovation engine that's moving forward. We need to work together to try to figure out those unintended consequences, the lessons that we are learning along the way when it comes to disinformation, such as, for example, the squishy bag that happens when we push down on one place and then are surprised when it's “Oh, we didn't think about that.” Working together, then we can put in place those instruments to be able to do that.
I've abstracted this out, I know, from your question around anti-competition and antitrust, but I'd like to look at it from the macro level and how these things ebb and flow. How do we then put in place strong protection mechanisms for businesses and for people? That's through partnerships.
Manager of User Privacy, Apple Inc.
I don't know that I have much to add to the comments of the other panellists. I think that we are very much about both trying to put the diversity of the App Store in front of our users and trying to enable great competition. I think that has been wildly successful for many different companies in that space.
When it comes to personal data, we practice data minimization and are not trying to empower Apple but instead to empower users.