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.
9:30 a.m.
Member, Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Houses of the Oireachtas
Okay.
Is that information used by Amazon for profiling and/or marketing?
9:30 a.m.
Director, Security Engineering, Office of the Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com
That information becomes part of your account information, just as it would if you were buying books on our website. Therefore, it could influence what we present to you as other things you might be interested in.
9:30 a.m.
Member, Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Houses of the Oireachtas
Okay.
9:30 a.m.
Director, Security Engineering, Office of the Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com
It's not passed to any third party. It's not used for advertising purposes and so forth.
9:30 a.m.
Member, Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Houses of the Oireachtas
Okay, but if you've asked about the weather in Bermuda and then you go on the Amazon website, you might be pitched a holiday book guide for Bermuda. Is that possible?
9:30 a.m.
Director, Security Engineering, Office of the Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com
It's theoretically possible, yes. I don't know if that actual algorithm is there.
9:30 a.m.
Member, Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Houses of the Oireachtas
Is it likely?
9:30 a.m.
Director, Security Engineering, Office of the Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com
I don't know. I'd have to get back to you on that.
9:30 a.m.
Member, Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Houses of the Oireachtas
Okay, but it is actually using the queries, which Alexa processes, to be of profit to the user. This could be used to make intelligent marketing pitches on the platform, yes?
9:30 a.m.
Director, Security Engineering, Office of the Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com
This is because the user directly ties the device to their account and they have full visibility into the utterances. You can see a full list of what you've said and you can delete any one of those. Those will immediately get removed from the database and would not be the basis for a recommendation.
9:30 a.m.
Member, Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Houses of the Oireachtas
Do users consent to that when they sign up? Is that part of the terms and conditions?
9:30 a.m.
Director, Security Engineering, Office of the Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com
I think it's very clear. The consent is part of the experience. To take a colloquial example, I haven't explicitly consented to my voice and video being recorded here today, but I understand from the context that it's probably happening. We believe that simple consumer experiences are best. We think our customers understand that for the service to work the way it's supposed to work, we are accumulating data about them—
9:30 a.m.
Director, Security Engineering, Office of the Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com
—and we make it really, really easy to delete and to control that data.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Nathaniel Erskine-Smith
Thanks very much, although you may have a better understanding of what's going on today than most users of Alexa.
9:35 a.m.
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
I'm sorry, Chair, but can I just make a point of order?
I want us to be really clear. When you're speaking before a committee, that's like speaking before a court. It's not about your consent to be recorded or that you think you may be recorded. This is a legal parliamentary process, so of course you're being recorded. To suggest that it's the same as Alexa selling you a thing in Barbados is ridiculous, and it undermines our Parliament.
I would just remind the witnesses that we are here to document for the international legislative community, and this will be on an official record.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you. I'll start with Microsoft.
The Microsoft ecosystem is quite large, as you know. You have the majority of the world's desktops, with Office 365, LinkedIn, Bing, Skype, MSN, Live.com, Hotmail and so on. You obviously have the ability to collect a tremendous amount of data on a tremendous number of people. Can you assure me that there's no data about individuals interchanged between any of the different platforms?
9:35 a.m.
National Technology Officer, Microsoft Canada Inc.
Do you mean data between, let's say, an Xbox user and your Office 365 type of user? Is that the type of question?
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Yes, or LinkedIn and Bing. We heard quite a bit in the first couple of days of this committee about the creation of avatars of users of different companies. Does Microsoft create an avatar of their users? Does it create an impression of who is using their services?
9:35 a.m.
National Technology Officer, Microsoft Canada Inc.
What we see is that if you have a common Microsoft account, that allows you to maintain and manage your data across those properties. The Bing product team would not necessarily go directly from the Xbox team and back and forth for the data that's required. You are in control of your data that's in the centre.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
My question was whether there is an interchange of the data between the services. You have your common log-in, but once you've gone past the log-in, you can go to different databases. Do the databases interact?
9:35 a.m.
National Technology Officer, Microsoft Canada Inc.
Again, across all the different platforms, I would have to look at each individual scenario that's done there to say largely that there's no data exchange across....
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Okay.
You recently bought GitHub, an open-source company, which I thought was pretty interesting. Why?
9:35 a.m.
National Technology Officer, Microsoft Canada Inc.
We recognize that the open-source community is a very vibrant community with a great development model. That open dialogue, that open discussion, has gone beyond simply the software conversation to broader projects. We saw that as an opportunity for us to help engage with that community.
In the past, you've seen that there was almost this animosity between ourselves and the open-source community. We've really embraced the concept of open source and concepts of open data to be able to help bring better innovation to the marketplace.