Status of Women Committee on Dec. 5th, 2016

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That was excellent.

I'm going to do something rare. I'm going to ask some questions.

I haven't given up yet on being able to regulate something. I was listening to our previous panel, and people were testifying that in Spain and the EU they have local regulations, and even global platforms like Google have to conform to them.

I would love to have some kind of regulation that wouldn't allow these platforms to upload content that hypersexualizes women or that is reflective of many of the rape culture items we've heard about, such as slut-shaming and catcalling and different things like that, and that there would actually be some requirement for diversity on the teams that are designing them.

I'd like to hear both of you talk about the regulation and the design.

[Corinne Charette]

In the EU, certainly, the regulation on the right to privacy is very, very strong. For instance, in the EU they have the right to be forgotten, or they're proposing the right to be forgotten. In Canada, our privacy legislation is strong, certainly, but it does not go to that extent, although in the EU it's still a proposal.

Regulation is a two-edged sword. The reality is that regulation is very hard to craft in an equitable way and comes at a cost to both government and business. To work out that fine balance is not easy. Also, compliance requires an effort. Given that no effort is free or without cost, I think that with the capacity we have and the resources available to us, there are probably more fruitful investments that would improve literacy, more than regulation would keep back. It's a constant balance.

[Dr. Sandra Robinson]

My view is similar. I don't know that it's legislation, but regulation is certainly possible by code. If we're working with big corporate providers that have the power to write the code and control the code, as they currently do, they already can filter code as it's uploaded. It's entirely possible.

Of course, in the U.S. it's called “censorship” and you can't have that, as it's against free speech, so there are issues there. Let's think about Canada. We could easily have a filtration system that parses or reads the code—image, text, video—as it's uploaded. It's coded based on a scale, so the scale has to be set up. It can interface with an age-based system much like they do in video gaming when you go on those sites. Also, it can be verified if there's access to the age of the individual who's doing the work, which means disclosing something other than having the person put in their fake age. You would actually have access to some kind of metadata that confirms the age of the user. These are all possible to do currently.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I still have time, so my next question has to do with the binary nature of some of the algorithms that are being used. When we talk about gender and we see that we're getting away from binary definitions of gender, what do you think we could be or should be doing in that area to prevent discrimination against gender?

[Dr. Sandra Robinson]

I'm thinking here of a previous witness, my colleague Dr. Rena Bivens, who probably addressed some of that. Again, there are all kinds of things that are possible through the code. Even a company as established and wealthy as Facebook chose to, at the surface—where the user interface exists for user interaction with Facebook—give people a range of 50 choices to self-identify, based around gender identification, or non-gender identification if they chose that, but the way in which the back-end system works at Facebook is that they still read data as binary.

What they're doing is monitoring people's actions as they leave the site. Their algorithms look for patterns that suggest this person is either male or female, that they're queer or heterosexual. There are so many places in which that can be determined and inferred from other actions. It's very tricky to actually build in a system that is truly open and truly encourages that kind of self-identity. People can still be discriminated against if other people begin to make the same inferences.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's our time for today.

Thank you very much to both of our witnesses for doing an excellent job.

Thank you to the committee for very great questions today. I really enjoyed the session.

I'll see you on Wednesday. The meeting is adjourned.