Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Facebook, Google, and Twitter—Oral evidence (QQ 1384–1455)
Q1386 Nadhim Zahawi: Do your organisations use personal private information
for commercial purposes?
Lord Allan of Hallam: To understand how Facebook works: our service is free at
the point of use and is funded by advertising, which is targeted. For example, if you run a
bicycle shop in London, you can target men aged between 30 and 40 in London who like
cycling with a particular model of bicycle. The personal information on people’s profiles
tells us that they live in London; that they are of that age; and that they like cycling. The
advertiser does not get a list of those people; he simply gets a contract with us that says we
will show his advertisement to that group of people. The personal information is part of
that advertising model, but that model is absolutely not about selling that personal
information or sharing it with third parties.
Q1387 Nadhim Zahawi: So, you do use it for that model to work?
Lord Allan of Hallam: It is used to support that model, which I think is widely
understood. We recently had an audit by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. He is
the auditor for our operations in Europe. He was quite clear that that kind of model of
advertising-funded internet services, on the basis you are not selling the personal data but
simply using them to generate an efficient advertising model, was a reasonable offering to
our users. We are very explicit in all of our terms of service that that is precisely what we
are doing.
Colin Crowell: Twitter is very similar. We use the information internally to render
service and continue to try to improve Twitter.
Q1388 Nadhim Zahawi: Does Twitter use the behavioural information, or just
the private information?
Colin Crowell: We use the information only internally to render and deliver the
tweets for the purposes of our advertising products. We are able to see, for example,
whether a promoted tweet is being clicked on frequently. That tells us whether or not to
serve that to more people, but we do not disclose or otherwise share that personal
information with advertisers.
Q1389 Nadhim Zahawi: But do you use the way people behave, in that you
monitor how they are looking at stuff?
Colin Crowell: Not as individuals. Our service is a publicly rendered one and whom
you follow is publicly displayed, so it is on the basis of whom you follow, not who you are as
an individual.
DJ Collins: If I may answer for Google, there are a couple of safeguards for users
that we’ve built in. For example, we have a product called the Ads Preference Manager.
You can see for yourself what we think you might be interested in. It is a series of guesses
on our part. You can either change those assumptions or you can say actually, I do not
want to be served any at all, so there is a high degree of control for the user. I just wanted
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