Thank you Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Patell, for being with us today. We greatly appreciate your feedback and also your overview of the work that Google is doing to combat frauds and scams.
I want to ask you about a class action lawsuit that has been filed, resulting from an incident in, I believe, 2025, as reported by La Presse, in which a Quebec woman is alleging she lost more than $30,000 after she clicked on a YouTube advertisement that allegedly had an AI-generated image of our Prime Minister, Mark Carney, advertising some digital currency investment scheme. Ultimately, she lost upwards of $30,000, according to her claims.
I do appreciate that this matter is before the courts. That being the case, I'm not asking you to comment specifically on matters before the courts, of course, but I do believe it raises a broader question that we've been seized with at this committee. Canadians are increasingly encountering AI-generated scams that impersonate public figures, impersonate a CBC news article and the like. I know you're very familiar with this problem. What responsibility do you believe Google and other platforms have—I know you have YouTube in your purview, but there are also Meta and others—regarding scams like this, which end up on your platforms? What responsibility do you have to Canadians in this regard?