Information & Ethics Committee on May 29th, 2019

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

Do you think there should be transparency to the public so that there's proper public accountability with the algorithms that you employ with such large troves of data and personal information?

[Mark Ryland]

I think the market is doing a good job of making sure that companies set a good bar on that.

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

You see, the frustrating thing is that previously you said you agree with the principles in the GDPR, and algorithmic explainability is a principle in the GDPR.

Apple, what do you think about it?

[Erik Neuenschwander]

In the machine learning that we employ, we do want users to understand that we do it primarily by putting it on the users' devices and training it on their data, as I've said. When we're training generalized models, we're doing that based on public data sets. Primarily, we're not training on personal data.

Where we would be training on personal data, we absolutely want to make sure that it is explainable and understandable by users.

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

Then you believe in that public transparency.

[Erik Neuenschwander]

We believe in transparency across many things.

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

Microsoft, would you comment?

[John Weigelt]

We're participating and we're contributing to the work that's happening here in Canada and one of the challenges around definitions. For large-scale unhuman intervention-type systems, there needs to be ability to tell the user what's happening behind the scenes.

It's a big area of controversy, a big area of research around explainability, generalizability, and how we look at outcomes.

The way that documentation is currently written, it almost looks as though if you have website localization—for example, if I am coming from Quebec and I then present a French website because of that—it would require algorithmic risk assessment and notice to the public.

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

You're concerned with definition, but in principle you agree with the idea.

[John Weigelt]

In principle, we agree with the idea and applaud the Government of Canada for putting that in place right now, and others should examine similar opportunities.

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

Including the private sector and Microsoft.

On competition law, I read a quote yesterday from the German regulator, who noted Facebook's superior market power and said, “The only choice the user has is either to accept comprehensive combination of data or to refrain from using the social network. In such a difficult situation the user's choice cannot be referred to as voluntary consent.”

Does the same principle apply to your companies?

[Mark Ryland]

We face robust competition in the markets we're in. In the cloud business, for example, our main competition is the old way of doing IT business, and there's a vast array of competitors across that.

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

I appreciate that. I'll flip it a bit. Should the impact on consumer privacy be a consideration in competition law?

[Mark Ryland]

Again, it's an area outside of my expertise. I hate to give that answer.

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

It's frustrating, because I did specifically let Amazon know that competition would be a matter we'd be discussing today.

Other companies, do you have a view as to whether the impact on consumer privacy should be a consideration in competition law?

[Erik Neuenschwander]

You imply that there is, at least in some cases, a single, all-or-nothing sort of consent, and we're very cognizant of that. What we do is offer very nuanced and fine-grained consent. It's possible to use an Apple device without signing in to or creating any Apple account, so we try to differentiate and separate those things.

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

I appreciate that.

Does Microsoft have a view?

[John Weigelt]

It's all about the data, and in particular safeguarding the data and how the data is used. I think you need to look more broadly at the data use. Perhaps data sheets for data would help in that regard, because I think privacy is about that data's security and accessibility.

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

I'm interested in seeing what the associate general counsel says tomorrow at the competition commissioner's data forum.

I'm moving forward with a secondary question on competition law.

In the 1990s, Explorer was free, and yet Microsoft was prevented from monopolizing the browser space. It wasn't protecting consumers on price; it was actually protecting innovation.

I'm going to pick on Amazon a bit. You said before that what I input into Alexa becomes part of my user profile. I assume that also means that what I watch on Prime, purchase from any number of sellers and search for on Amazon or beyond on the Internet all combine into a single profile, presumably to direct targeted ads.

I also wonder if my user profile, combined with everyone's user profile, drives your decisions to create new products. Is that fair?

[Mark Ryland]

We certainly look at the trends, purchases and behaviour of our customers, in terms of determining future—

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

Far apart from that, and in answer to Mr. Saini's questions, you said you're not tracking the information of third party sellers on your websites. If you look at it from the other perspective, you are tracking all of our individual purchase decisions on Amazon and combining all of those decisions in order to compete against those third party sellers in your marketplace. How is that not use of dominance?

[Mark Ryland]

I think the fact that the third party marketplace is wildly successful and that there are a huge number of very successful businesses in it is a very clear indicator that this is not a problem.

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

You don't think you have an unfair market advantage.

[Mark Ryland]

No.

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

The last question I have was raised by—