Information & Ethics committee  I'm not aware of any such capability, but I also want to be clear that it would be irresponsible for me or any other employee of a technology company to make categorical guarantees about what governments are capable of or incapable of in terms of their ability to conduct activities, including hacking, on their own initiative—

Information & Ethics committee  I would disagree with the characterization about extensive data collection. We collect less data in many instances than our competitors. If you sign up for a TikTok account, the only thing you need to provide is an email address or phone number, date of birth and a user name. You can create an account in that fashion.

Information & Ethics committee  What I can tell you is that when people are using our app or collecting information—

Information & Ethics committee  We're not collecting—

Information & Ethics committee  No.

Information & Ethics committee  The status is those negotiations are ongoing.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm happy to talk further about the protocols we've deployed to address those concerns, if that's useful. We do have a project, called Project Texas, that endeavours to address the concerns that the U.S. government has raised, mainly the concerns about Chinese government access to user data and how the platform may be manipulated or used as a conduit for—

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not sure that I understand the question.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the clarification; I appreciate that. Yes, we do have a privacy policy. We publish information about the data that we collect, how we use it, the extent to which it may be disclosed and under what conditions. We provide extensive settings that users can utilize to the extent that they want to limit information sharing.

Information & Ethics committee  We are constantly endeavouring to improve their understanding of how we collect and use data. It's one of the reasons that we provide the settings that we do—so that they can take advantage of those if they want to further protect their privacy. In many instances, as Steve mentioned in his opening statement, those privacy protections are available by default.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for that question. I'm aware of one. India has banned the app. However, as you know, there are countries where the app is not available, due to policies, on government devices. I'm not sure how many of those countries there are.

Information & Ethics committee  I'm happy to answer that question. That fine was imposed, and it was in relation to settings for younger users. The investigation that took place covered the period from July to December in 2020. At the time the investigation was commenced, we had already implemented protocols to make certain teenagers' accounts private by default.

Information & Ethics committee  We've been quite clear that we would not disclose user data to the Chinese government if it made a request. It has not made such a request, and the Chinese government has not asserted the rights over any TikTok user data. The TikTok app itself is not available in mainland China.

Information & Ethics committee  Canadian data is stored in the United States, in Singapore and in Malaysia. That's where the servers are located.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question. As I think my colleague Steve noted in his opening statement, we do have a Canadian operating entity. We have Canadian users so we are subject to Canadian law, but I want to emphasize, too, that we have data access approval policies. If any employee wants to access user data, they need to make a request.