Information & Ethics Committee on Dec. 13th, 2023

[Josh Harris]

Yes. I'll have to explore that with my colleagues to make sure that we'll be able to get that granular enough to be useful to the committee.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Is there a Canadian version of the “Twitter files”?

[Josh Harris]

Not to my knowledge.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

I have the same question for Meta with respect to takedown requests by the government.

Is that something that you keep track of, and if so, are you able to itemize the frequency and the nature of each occurrence? Is that something you would be able to provide to the committee in writing, Ms. Curran?

[Rachel Curran]

Yes, we can. We respond to valid government requests in accordance with applicable law and our terms of service. Those requests are publicly disclosed at our transparency centre, and we'd be happy to provide more detail on those to the committee.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Just very quickly, because I only have 15 seconds left, Ms. Patell, is that something that Google would be able to do?

[Jeanette Patell]

Yes, absolutely. We publish every six months a transparency report with government removal requests, and we'd be happy to provide that information to the committee.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Thank you very much.

I have about 10 seconds left.

Chair, I hope we're going to have the opportunity for another round of questions with Ms. Vecchio. She wants to look into the protection of minors from exposure to sexually explicit material online, particularly, I would say, including links to the online crime scene that is Pornhub. That's just a flag for all of you to expect some questions about that in the next round from us.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Barrett, for that. That concludes your round of questioning.

I am going to just make it clear that if a written response is required because of a request from the committee, we will have the clerk follow up with each one of you on what that specific request is to provide documents. Then we're going to set a deadline for a week from today for those documents to be provided to the committee. That's just to make it clear for everyone.

Ms. Khalid, you have six minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for appearing and for your presentations. I appreciate that all of you talked about foreign interference and the protection of Canadian data. It's incumbent upon all of us to be proactive about the protection of Canadians.

I will turn to Meta first.

There was a $9-million penalty in 2020 in Canada for misleading privacy claims, a $5-billion penalty for deceiving users in the U.S., and a 405-million-euro penalty in 2022 in Europe. There are a lot more sanctions. What is the issue here with respect to protecting Canadians' privacy here in Canada?

[Rachel Curran]

I assume you're talking about Cambridge Analytica, which was some years ago now. As we've always maintained, there was no evidence that Canadians' information was shared with Cambridge Analytica. Meta also does not sell our user data, at all, unequivocally. Indeed, even when the Federal Court examined the Cambridge Analytica issue, they agreed with our position, finding that there was insufficient evidence that Canadians' data was shared and that, in any event, Facebook's data-sharing practices were adequately disclosed.

That said, in the last few years, certainly since 2019, we have transformed privacy at Meta and built one of the most comprehensive privacy programs in the world. We look forward to building products and services that people love, trust, and use with privacy at the forefront.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you.

Where do you store Canadian data?

[Rachel Curran]

I don't know the answer to that.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Can we get an answer to that, please, if that's okay?

[Rachel Curran]

I will commit to getting back to the committee.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much.

To Google, how do you make money on people's personal data?

[Jeanette Patell]

Thank you for the question and the opportunity to share more about our practices.

We build products and services that are secure by default and private by design. As we make publicly clear, a majority of our revenue is built upon advertising. Our commitment to our users is to give them visibility into how their information is informing their experience on our services, to give them tools for transparency and to ultimately put them in control in how their information is being used.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you. I appreciate that.

I looked at the Apple App Store earlier. Chrome, which is a product of yours, links location, audio data, search history, browsing history, identifiers, usage data, and then “other data” to individuals. What do you do with all that information? How do you use that?

[Jeanette Patell]

Information ultimately helps make our products function properly and effectively, makes them more secure, gives the ability to detect and mitigate fraud, and makes them more helpful for individuals. We provide settings for individuals to make the choices that are right for them in terms of how their information is being collected and used.

We have something called the privacy checkup centre, as well as a My Ad Center, where individuals can see at a pretty granular level how this information is being used to inform their experience with our services. They have the opportunity to either delete that information or turn off things like personalized advertising.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Does it actually get deleted?

[Jeanette Patell]

Yes. I can't go into detail on our data retention policies here, because I'm just not an expert in that domain, but we do provide information to individuals about this in their privacy centre.

We also have been leading in putting in place an auto-delete function for new accounts. Having that function auto-deletes information after 18 months.

Ultimately, this is all about users being able to make the choices that are right for them. That's where transparency and providing settings for everybody are a big part of our commitment to privacy by design.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Can you talk to us about tags on YouTube, specifically MGTOW? It stands for “men going their own way”, which is associated with misogyny through male supremacy ideology.

Do you think that allowing such tags impacts the privacy and also the safety of Canadians?

[Jeanette Patell]

Maybe I'll take a step back and speak to how we apply our content policies on YouTube.

It's important because our community guidelines, which are quite comprehensive, apply to all content on our platform, whether that's comments, external links or the video itself, etc. Responsibility is really at the core. It underpins our entire platform at YouTube.

When we look at specific instances like this—I'm not a trained reviewer in trust and safety, but we have over 20,000 people trained in this domain—and when we become aware of a concern around that, we would assess whether each piece of content does meet the standards of our community guidelines.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Do you think—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

That's it, Ms. Khalid. It was more than six minutes.

Thank you, Ms. Patell.

I want to make sure everyone has their French interpretation on.

Mr. Villemure, you have the floor for six minutes.