Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I better understand the question now, sir. Again, we do have proactive measures in place that are getting increasingly better and sophisticated. Those are the AI tools I've talked about for us to be able to proactively delete accounts before mischief arrives. Again, we have looked at elections subsequent to the U.S. presidential one, for example, the German election.

Information & Ethics committee  —our good faith has been long-standing, and we've been applauded for it.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely, sir, and it's not just in the privacy realm. There are many other areas that we touch on in how we operate or how users use our service, and we always want to be doing it in a way that is consistent.

Information & Ethics committee  Sure, I'd be happy to do that. I can obviously only speak for how we think about it at Facebook. I don't want to make representations for other companies. Again, it is clear that we were much too slow to identify this new kind of threat back in the U.S. presidential election. When we did turn our mind to it—and I was getting at it a bit with an answer to Mr.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for that, sir. We are doing a lot of thinking on that. We've made commitments for the U.S. mid-terms coming up, and I'd be happy to share them with you.

Information & Ethics committee  We work with academics, NGOs, civil society, cultural organizations, indigenous groups, chambers of commerce, and small businesses. We build partnerships with people around the country. This is what it means to do public policy at Facebook, and I'm very proud of that. Thank you for that feedback, and we will certainly take that under advisement.

Information & Ethics committee  There's a bit of a lag because we're talking past each other. Certainly you are protected by PIPEDA. Let me just find a different way to explain. We have had a longstanding relationship with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada will investigate us, as they are doing right now, for things that may come in conflict with PIPEDA.

Information & Ethics committee  I want to thank the minister. That was very generous.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, sir, thank you for the question. This question does go to the heart of the company's integrity and, quite frankly, my integrity personally. I appreciate the opportunity to address this head on, if I may. At no time has Facebook come close to meeting the threshold for registration as a lobbyist.

Information & Ethics committee  —on a monthly basis, sir, and will, of course, register if and when we meet the threshold.

Information & Ethics committee  To be clear, the meeting you're referring to with Minister Morneau, with all due respect to all parties involved, was a result of his office reaching out to Facebook. He wanted some advice on how to do Facebook Live for his budget speech.

Information & Ethics committee  If you play it out that way, that is what I spend my time doing. I'm proud of it—

Information & Ethics committee  We'll certainly take that under advisement. Again, we do not meet the threshold. Just to be clear to committee members, with 23 million Canadians on Facebook, and two billion globally, people use the service in many different ways. That gives rise, as we're discussing today and in other realms, to very novel public policy challenges.

Information & Ethics committee  If I may just add to that, on the specific thing about reaching out to the broader ecosystem and working with partners, certainly we do that in Canada with MediaSmarts, as I mentioned, which is Canada's digital literacy organization. They work closely with schools in classrooms across the country.

Information & Ethics committee  One way to look at it and the things that Rob went through in his opening statement is to say that the process we're engaged in is very much locking down the platform. In a way, what you're talking about is making sure certain things.... We already made significant changes in 2014, as Rob mentioned, but even today, subsequent to the Cambridge Analytica news reports, we are doing a whole bunch of things not only retroactively to look at what happened with these apps, but also prospectively to change the way apps work on Facebook and drastically limit the amount of information they can get.