Google CEO testifies to Congress about user data privacy FULL

good morning the Judiciary Committee will come to order and without objection the chairs authorize to declare recesses of the committee at any time we welcome everyone to this morning's hearing on transparency and accountability examining google and its data collection use and filtering practices before I recognize myself and the ranking member for opening statements I'd like to recognize our first witness the Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California for his statement welcome well thank you mr. Goodlatte chairman Goodlatte for working with me to organize this hearing I want to thank sundar pichai for testifying on Capitol Hill we appreciate and note your willingness to travel here and answer our questions first in a private setting in September and now in a public setting Google is one of the most valuable companies in America because of what it does Google search engine organizes the entire internet and by extension almost all the information in the world this is hardly an exaggeration here's a statistic you will hear a lot today but it bears repeating according to The Wall Street Journal 90 percent of all internet searches go through Google that is power and it comes with responsibility mr. pachai it is it was necessary to convene this hearing because of the widening gap of distrust between technology companies and the American people for our country and economy to grow stronger the American people must be able to have trust in the great companies of the 21st century we can alleviate some of their concerns today with transparency and candor I hope we can begin to restore trust in the technology companies that shape our world but we need answers we need to know first that Google is committed to the free-market ideals of competition and on entrepreneurship that launched its revolutionary products to begin with second we need to be sure that any political bias within Google's workforce does not creep in to its search products third we need to know that Google is living up to the Amer Ericka's belief in free expression and human rights when it deals with foreign governments now a word on the last subject right now google reportedly is developing a censored search engine with the Chinese Communist Party it is also developing next-generation technology on Chinese soil and in conjunction with Chinese national champions like Tinson technology that the MINIX administration considers a national priority now this news raises a troubling possibility that Google is being used to strengthen China's system of surveillance repression and control right this very second China's authoritarian system detains more than a million religious minorities and re-education camps mister pachai I urge you to reflect on that fact and on the promise your company made when it pulled out of the China market in 2010 and I have plotted you for that move in 2010 back then Google promised it would not censor its search results in China or compromised its commitment to a free and open Internet now in light of these recent events I think the American people deserve to know is something changed and if so what all of these topics competition censorship bias and others point to one fundamental question that demands the nation's attention are America's technology companies serving as instruments of freedom are instruments of control are they fulfilling the promise of the digital age are they advancing the cause of self-government or are they serving of instruments of manipulation used by powerful interests and foreign governments to rob the people of their power agency and dignity I believe we need to grapple with these questions together as a nation because the free world depends on a free internet we need to know that Google is on the side of the free world and that it will provide its services free of anti-competitive of behavior political bias and censorship I want to thank you again for being here and answering these questions I look forward to listening to the answers with a very open mind and I yield back I'd now like to invite mr. pichai to take his seat at the witness table without objection the chair now recognizes the ranking member mr. Nadler for a point of personal privilege to recognize a member of his staff a very distinguished member of his staff Thank You mr. chairman mr. chairman I want to take a moment to recognize Danielle Brown whose last working day for the committee is tomorrow danielle has served on the Judiciary Committee Democratic staff for more than a decade in a variety of roles beginning a staff assistant and then going to council parliamentarian chief legislative counsel and most recently deputy chief counsel danielle has been essential to the operations of this committee and she has been involved in nearly every important piece of committee business over the last decade her interests and expertise range from protecting vulnerable immigrants to ensuring reproductive freedom and preserving vital consumer protections she is leaving us now unfortunately to become general counsel and parliamentarian of the Ways and Means Committee our loss is surely their game I wish you well I appreciate a wise counsel I thank her for all of her years of service to this committee and I hope the committee will join me in thanking her for her years of service to this committee would the gentleman yield [Applause] I will yield to the Chairman I thank the gentleman for yielding I would like to join him in thanking Danielle for her service to this committee she has worked with members on both sides of the aisle she has worked with the majority staff very productively very cooperatively on a great many issues that have made this committee not only more productive but also operating in a fashion that has resulted in a number of bills getting from this committee all the way to the President's desk whether that president be Barack Obama or Donald Trump that's an accomplishment that this entire committee should be proud of and Danielle should be proud that she's played an important part in doing that I thank you I now recognize myself for an opening statement in the United States Google operates the preeminent internet search engine the leading email service provider and the Android operating system which runs most of its smart most of the smart phones in the United States when a consumer performs an internet search sends an email or uses his or her smartphone Google collects information on that person in fact almost every minute of every day the Android operating system sends information about the exact location temperature barometric pressure and speed of movement of every phone that runs on the Android operating system with Americans carrying their smartphones all day every day Google is able to collect an amount of information about its users that would even make the NSA blush of course when users click through the Terms of Service for these services they do consent to such collection but I think it is fair to say that most Americans have no idea the sheer volume of detailed information that is collected today I hope to get answers on the extent of data collection and use by Google in addition decades ago Congress passed the communications decent the act including section 230 of that act which allows service providers to remove lewd lascivious excessively violent or otherwise objectionable content from their platforms this law allows service providers to remove illegal materials including child pornography and content that is illegal under our intellectual property laws while meant to allow them to block illegal obscene and harmful materials there is some discretion that service providers by necessity must use to make decisions about what content is harmful or objectionable given Google's ubiquity in the search market google is often consumers first and last stop when searching for information on the Internet as such this committee is very interested in how Google makes decisions about what constitutes objectionable content that justifies filtering and who at Google makes these decisions given the revelation that top executives at Google have discussed how the results of the 2016 elections do comply with Google's values these questions have become all the more important while it is true that Google is not a government entity and so it does not have to comply with the First Amendment the American people deserve to know what types of information they are not getting when they perform searches on the Internet the market works best when information about products and services is readily available and so today on behalf of this committee and the American consumer I hope to get answers from mr. pichai regarding who at Google makes the judgement calls on whether to filter or block objectionable content and what metrics Google uses to make those decisions I want to thank Google CEO for his willingness to testify today to answer these and other questions with respect to search results algorithmic screening is the primary means through which Google sorts data and information Google's search algorithm for example calculates what is presented to a user based on the variables the user inputs into the search bar at its best Google's algorithm Reach is the best answer in the least amount of time while providing choices to the user by ranking pages most relevant to the search inquiry of course by ranking pages Google search always favors one page over another this kind of bias appears harmless after all the point of a search is to discriminate among multiple relevant sources to find the best answer this process however turns much more sinister with allegations that Google manipulates its algorithm to favor the political party it likes the ideas that it likes or the products that it likes there are numerous allegations in the news that Google employees have thought about doing this talked about doing this and have done it the dangerous implications to a fair democratic process cannot be understated one study performed by psychologist Robert Epstein has revealed that internet search rankings have a significant impact on consumer choices mainly because users trust and choose higher ranked results more than lower ranked results after performing five relevant double-blind randomized controlled experiments using a total of forty five hundred and fifty six undecided voters representing diverse demographic characteristics of the voting populations of the United States and India the study revealed that biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups and search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation the potential for this kind of bias is clearly problematic and is further compounded by the fact that Google everyday collects mountains of information about its users while they are actively engaged with a Google product or even when they are not according to a study conducted by Vanderbilt University a dormant stationary Android phone with chrome active in the background communicated location information to Google three hundred and forty times during a 24-hour period or at an average of 14 data communications per hour the locate the collection of location data may be obvious to most users but they are often unaware of the many sensors that the Android platform supports including an accelerometer a barometer and a photometer these photometer these sensors in addition to the cameras and microphone on a mobile device can collate into a very accurate picture of where a user is what they are doing and who else is there the shocking amount of information that Google collects via its phones was recently featured on Good Morning America in which a reporter using an Android phone with no SIM card that wasn't connected to the Internet discovered that the phone collected the device's movement even identifying the mode of transportation such as the subway or even a bicycle and at times taking ten sensor readings per minute moreover Google's practice of reinforcing its dominance in light of allegations of self-serving bias creates little choice for consumers across the spectrum of internet-based products or services given that Google's ads show up on non Google websites and Google's search engine is being used as the default search tool on other products such as the Apple phone it is almost impossible to avoid Google altogether Google in many things that Google as many things it's one of the largest data collectors ever seen in human history it's an advertiser that can get the right product to the right customer at precisely the right time Google is also an Internet giant directing over 3.5 billion searches per day with this massive Authority however comes the potential for far-reaching abuse the mere suspicion that Google manipulates its products and features for self-serving or even political purposes raises serious concerns about its business practices its impact on free speech and our democratic process and Americans trust that the information gathered about them in their day to day lives is with their knowledge and is not being used against them my hope is that through our inquiries today we will ensure more transparency and accountability going forward last despite the nature and scope of today's hearing Google is still the story of the American Dream the company was started by two individuals in a garage and grew to be one of the most successful companies in the world two decades ago we could not fathom instantaneous access to more information than that which is contained in all the encyclopedias in the world now we take that for granted because of the innovative services Google provides with that I want to again thank our witness for his presence here today I look forward to your testimony it's now my pleasure to recognize the ranking member of the committee the gentleman from New York mr. Nadler for his opening statement Thank You mr. chairman mr. chairman our society has become increasingly reliant on social media and other online platforms to obtain create share and sort information this information helps us make decisions ranging in importance from where to make dinner reservations to which candidate to vote for in the presidential election the public's increasing use of these platforms has generated many positive benefits for society but it is it has also given rise to some troubling trends google is among the dominant firms in this field as such given the public's widespread use and reliance on its products and services there are legitimate questions regarding the company's policies and practices including with respect to content moderation and the protection of user privacy but before we delve into these questions I must first dispense with a completely illegitimate issue which is the fantasy dreamed up by some conservatives that Google and other online platforms have an anti conservative bias as I have said repeatedly no credible evidence supports this right-wing conspiracy theory I have little doubt that my Republican colleagues will spend much of their time presenting a laundry list of anecdotes and out of context statements made by Google employees as suppose it evidence of anti conservative bias but none of that will actually make it true but this fact free propaganda helped generate the mistrust that the majority leader referred to a few moments ago and even if Google were deliberately discriminating against conservative viewpoints just as Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting and conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh discriminate against liberal points of view that would be it's right as a private company to do so not to be questioned by government during the Reagan administration about 35 years ago the Federal Communications Commission nurse appointed by Ronald Reagan abolished what we used to have called the Fairness Doctrine which placed an obligation on broadcasters who use the public airwaves to be fair to different points of view this question might be relevant if the Republican members wanted to bring back the Fairness Doctrine an expanded scope to social media companies I doubt we will see any interest in doing so but we should not let the delusions of the far-right distract us from the real issues that should be the focus of today's hearing for example we should examine what Google is doing to stop hostile foreign powers from using its platform to spread false information in order to harm our political discourse it's been more than two years since the 2016 election if this committee has not held a single hearing focused on Russia's campaign to manipulate online platforms to undermine American democracy despite the fact that it is the consensus view of our intelligence agencies that Russia engaged in a massive disinformation campaign to influence the 2016 election I hope that mr. pitch I can tell us what actions Google has taken to counter this unprecedented attack and what gaps remain in its defenses without being so specific as to give a guidance to foreign powers this may help Congress determine what more can be done to further insulate our democratic processes from foreign interference we should also examine how Google enforces community stand is the prohibit racist or bigoted threats and other inappropriate conduct while Internet platforms have produced many societal benefits they've also provided a new tool for those seeking to stoke racial and ethnic hatred the presence of hateful conduct and content on these platforms as we made all the more alarming by the recent rise in hate motivated violence according to statistics really recently released by the FBI reported incidents of hate crimes rose by 17 percent last year compared to 2016 marking the third consecutive year that such reports have increased the horrible massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh the recent murder of an African American couple in the Kentucky grocery store the killing of an Indian engineer last year in Kansas are sadly not isolated outbursts of violence but the most salient examples of a troubling trend we should consider to what extent Google and other online platforms may have been used to foment and to disseminate such hatred and how these platforms can play a constructive role in combating its spread as the dominant player in this field Google possessed a significant market power it is also useful to examine its policies and practices to ensure that other companies are able to compete in an open and fair marketplace there are also concerns about the prevalence of pirated material available on Google and other internet platforms at the expense of legitimate content finally it is important to know what Google is doing to protect this users data privacy and data security The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Google discovered last March that a bug in his social media platform Google+ had exposed the private profile data of up to 500,000 users to third-party developers but adopted not to disclose the issue publicly not even to those who may have been affected at the time and just yesterday the company announced that it had discovered in another Google+ bug they may have exposed the private profile data of millions of users while Google has so far found no evidence that developers have in fact abused these bugs or that any use of profile data has been misused in any way incidents like this still raise legitimate questions about what types of data exposures a company is obligated to disclose publicly it also raises questions about how much control users should have over their own data and how such control should be regulated I am also disturbed by recent reports that Google is developing a search engine for the Chinese mainland market according to these reports the search engine would not only accommodate Chinese government censors it might allow the Chinese government to track individuals by linking search terms to the users mobile phone number unfortunately in this our fourth hearing devoted to entirely fictitious allegations of conservative anti conservative bias by Internet companies we will waste more time and more taxpayer money and elevating well-worn right-wing conspiracy theories instead of concentrating the substantive questions and issues it should be the focus of our hearings our committee can and must and will do better are you back the balance of my time Thank You mr. Nadler we welcome our distinguished witness and if you would please rise I'll begin by swearing you in these raise your right hand do you swear that the testimony that you are about to give shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God thank you let the record show that the witness answered in the affirmative our only witness today is mr. sundar Pichai chai is the chief executive officer of Google's your written statement will be entered into the record in its entirety and we ask that you summarize your testimony in five minutes to help you stay within that time there's a timing light on your table when the light switches from green to yellow you have one minute to conclude your testimony when the light turns red it signals you or five minutes have expired mr. pitch I you are very welcome and you may begin chairman good luck ranking women adler distinguished members of the committee thank you for the opportunity to be here today I joined Google 15 years ago and have been privileged to serve a CEO for the past three years but my love for information and technology began long before that it's been 25 years since I made the u.s. my home growing up in India I have distinct memories of when my family got its first phone and its first television each new technology made a profound difference in our lives getting the phone meant I could call ahead to the hospital to check that the blood were in instead of taking a two-hour trip there and the television well it only had one channel but I couldn't have been more true by its arrival those experiences made me a technology optimist and they remain one today not only because I believe in technology but because I believe in people and their ability to use technology to improve their lives I'm incredibly proud of what Google does to empower people around the world especially here in the US I'd like to take a moment to share a bit of background on that 20 years ago two students one from Michigan and one from Maryland came together at Stanford with a big idea to provide users with access to the world's information that mission still drives everything we do whether that's saving a few minutes on your morning commute or helping doctors detect disease and save lives today Google is more than a search engine we are a global company that's committed to building products for everyone that means working with many industries from education and healthcare to manufacturing and entertainment even as we expand into new markets we never forget our American roots it's no coincidence that a company dedicated to free flow of information was founded right here in the US as an American company we cherish the values and freedoms that have allowed us to grow and serve so many users and I'm proud to say we do and we will continue to work with the government to keep our country safe and secure over the years our footprint has expanded far beyond California to states such as Texas Virginia Oklahoma and Alabama today in the u.s. we are growing faster outside of the barrier than within it I've had that great opportunity to travel across the country and see all the places that are that are powering our digital economy from Clarksville to Pittsburgh to San Diego where we recently launched a partnership with the USO to help veterans and military families along the way I've met many people who depend on Google to learn new skills find jobs or new businesses over the past year we have supported more than 1.5 million American businesses and over the past three years we have made direct contributions of 150 billion dollars to the US economy added more than 24,000 employees and paid over 43 billion dollars to our us partners across search YouTube and Android these investments strengthen our communities and support thousands of American jobs they also allow us to provide great services to our users to help them through the day it's an honor to play this role in people's lives and it's one we know comes with great responsibility protecting the privacy and security of our users has long been an essential part of our mission even mr. an enormous amount of work over the years to bring choice transparency and control to our users these values are built into every product we make we recognize the important role of governments including this committee in setting rules for the development and use of technology to that end we support federal privacy legislation and proposed a legislative framework for privacy earlier this year users look look to us to provide accurate trusted information and we work hard to ensure the integrity for products we have put a number of checks and balances in place to ensure they continue to live up to our standards I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way to do otherwise would be against our core principles and our business interests we are a company that provides platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions and there is no shortage of them amongst our employees some Googlers or former servicemen and women who have risked much in defense of their country some are civil libertarians who fiercely defend freedom of expression some are parents who worry about the role technology plays in our households some like me are immigrants who are profoundly grateful to the freedoms and opportunities it offers and some of us are many of these things let me close by saying that leading Google has been the greatest professional honor of my life it's a challenging moment for our industry but I'm privileged to be here I greatly appreciate you letting me share the story of Google and our work to build products worthy of the trust uses place in us thank you for the opportunity and I look forward to answering your questions thank you will now proceed under the five-minute rule with questions and I'll begin by recognizing myself mr. P chai is it true that the Android operating system sends Google information every few minutes detailing the exact location of a smartphone within a few feet the speed of movement of the phone the altitude of the phone sufficient to determine what floor of a building the phone is on the temperature surrounding the phone and other readings and if so with Americans carrying their phones with them virtually at all times doesn't the collection of this volume of detailed information really mean that Google is compiling information about virtually every movement an individual with a smartphone is making every hour of every day mr. chairman thank you for that question today for any service we provide our users we go to great lengths to protect our privacy and we give them transparency choice and control Android is a powerful platform and and provide smart phone for over two billion people and as part of that it depends on the applications users choose to use if you're using a fitness application which is deducting the number of steps you walk you expect it to send that information but it's a choice users make we make it clear and and it depends on the use cases so the the answer to my question my first question is yes is that correct that the information that I cited is gathered by Google if the for Google services you have a choice of what information is collected and we make it transparent and transparent I understand there are there are uses that consumers make use of I use it to keep track of the number of steps I walk I understand that service that one of your competitors provides so I understand that purpose but do you think the which consumer understands that Google will collect this volume of detailed information when they click through the terms of service agreements in order to use the Android operating system it's really important for us that you know that average users are able to understand it this is why we do something called privacy check out the average users read the Terms of Service and the updates that are very frequently sent to us beyond the Terms of Service we actually offer we remind users to do a privacy check up and we make it very obvious every month in fact in the last 28 days 160 million users vent to the pen to their my account settings where they can clearly see what information we have we actually give you no show it back to them and we give clear toggles by category where they can decide whether that information is collected stored or more importantly if they decide to stop using it we work hard to make it possible for users to take their data with them if they choose to use another service let me switch to the issue of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act you heard me say in my opening statement that this provides broad liability protections for you and other technology companies for good-faith restrictions that when Google thinks something is obscene lewd lascivious filthy excessively violent harassing or otherwise objectionable on the other hand objectionable material by whatever standard applied likely elicits the most engagement from users on your site and for Google increased engagement potentially means increased revenue however it is important for Google to make very clear where it draws the line and I don't believe Google has done its best to make that clear so what I would ask is the following would Google or YouTube be willing to make changes in support of a healthier civic dialogue if doing so meant a drop in user engagement metrics absolutely mr. chairman we have a long track record of we've always focused on long term goals to its user satisfaction we focus on their knowledge happiness success and and and that's what we work hard to create it is important to us that platforms like YouTube are viable over the long run it's an our natural incentive to do so YouTube is a place where users advertisers and content creators who make their livelihoods use the platform and so we want to make this work in a sustainable way when it comes to political advertising as you know some of your competitors in other advertising media are required by law to offer the same rate the lowest rate as a matter of fact to all political candidates so for example that's true in television radio would Google should competing political candidates be charged the same effective ad rates to reach prospective voters our advertising products are built without any bias and and the rates are comparative set by a live auction process so depending on the keywords for which you're bidding for depending on the demand there is in the auction the prices are automatically calculated so you know the system decides that it's automatically calculated but could two competing political candidates targeting the same audience see different ad rates and if yes could that disparity be substantial yeah there wouldn't be a difference based on you know any political reasons unless there are keywords which are of particular interest in the market determines that so it's it's essentially a supply demand equilibrium it can lead to difference in rates but it will vary from time to time can those rates be very substantial in difference there could be occasions where yes there could be difference in rates yeah I haven't looked at the specifics of it yet so the result is different than in other markets like television or radio where every candidate is entitled to the lowest rate that that television station or radio station offers to any political candidate for office we you know there could be variations based on the time of today the keywords you're choosing to go for you know the geographies you're advertising in but it's decided by the system and it's a process we have done for over 20 years and it let me assure you anything to do with our civic process we make sure we do so in a non-partisan way and it's really important for us thank you the chair recognizes the gentleman from New York mr. Nadler for five minutes Thank You mr. Petri according to media reports Google found evidence that well let me go through the other one first Google found a bug in his Google Plus social media platform that could have potentially exposed the private data of up to half a million users without the consent to third-party developers Google however did not disclose this bug until months later after it was revealed by a report in the Wall Street Journal yesterday as I mentioned before they found that you announced another bug what legal obligations is the company under to disclose that exposures that do not involve sensitive financial information but still involve private personal data like users name age email address or phone number congressman we take privacy seriously delete the bugs you mentioned our bugs v we found them by either doing an audit or you know using our automated testing systems whenever we find any bugs we follow you know it gets escalated to our privacy and data production office and we comply with I'm not criticizing what you do I'm asking what legal obligation is the company under to disclose such such data exposures that don't involve financial information but still involve other personal information it depends on the situation we follow the requirements and yeah and in that case in the first case typically we look at our legal requirements but we go above and beyond to make sure we do the right thing for our users in the first case abode there was no evidence data was misused and we couldn't accurately did I understand all that but my question is what legal obligations are there you know today right now if you found a bug you know and you ascertain once you've done the investigation and you've ascertain the users who are eligible for modification my understanding is you have 72 hours and we both notify users as well as regulators in that timeframe okay thank you now according to media reports Google found evidence that Russian agents spent thousands of dollars to purchase ads on its advertising platforms that spanned multiple Google products as part of the agents the Russian agents campaigned to interfere in the election two years ago additionally juniper Downs head of global policy for YouTube testified in July the YouTube had identified and shut down multiple and shut down multiple channels containing thousands of videos associated with the Russian misinformation campaign does Google now know the full extent to which its online platforms were exploited by Russian actors in the election two years ago we have you know we undertook a very thorough investigation and in 2016 we now know that there were two main ad accounts linked to Russia which which you know advertised on Google for about forty seven hundred dollars in advertising we also found other limited total of 47 hundred dollars that's right which was you know no amount is okay here but you know but we found limited activity improper activity we have learned a lot from that and we've you know dramatically increased the production's we have around our election offerings leading up to the current elections we did we again found limited activity both from the internet research agency in Russia as well as accounts linked to Iran and while what specific steps have you taken including during the recent 2018 elections to protect his further interference by Russia or other hostile foreign powers we have undertaken a significant review of how ads are bought you know we look for the origin of these accounts we share and collaborate with law enforcement other technology companies and we've essentially are investing a lot of effort and oversight in this area looking ahead to the next I assume we can have your assurances that Google will work with this committee as we examine the issue of how to better secure our elections from future foreign interference congressman protecting our elections is foundational to our democracy and you you have my full commitment that will do that okay my last question cuz we time is running out what are you doing what is Google doing to combat the spread of white supremacy and right-wing extremism of course YouTube congressman YouTube is an important platform we do want to allow for diverse perspectives and opinions but we have rules of the road we have clear content policies and we have policies against many categories and we are transparent about these policies and you know and when we find violations on our policies we do remove those videos and handle content when you fight violations you work off of our policy for example we have policies against hate speech and we clearly define them and if we find any violations there we do take down the take down content when you take down the content do you know to who put it up so you can flag future content from the same sources we on you know we look at it on a video by video basis to the extent that I repeat offenses from a same account we do take into account and we notify the content creator and we follow up accordingly thank you very much I yield back chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas mr. Smith for five minutes Thank You mr. chairman mr. chairman google has revolutionized the world though not entirely in the way I expected Americans deserve the facts objectively reported the muting of conservative voices by Internet platforms has intensified especially during the presidency of Donald Trump more than 90 percent of all internet searches take place on Google or its subsidiary YouTube and they are curating what we see google has long faced criticism for manipulating search results to censor conservatives conservative individuals and organizations have had their pro tunc content tagged as hate speech or had their content reduced in search results an enforcement of immigration laws has been tagged as hate speech as well such actions pose a grave threat to our democratic form of government pj media found that 92 6% of search results for trump were from liberal media outlets in fact not a single right-leaning site appeared on the first page of search results this doesn't happen by accident but is baked into the algorithms those who write the algorithms get the results they must want and apparently management allows it dr. Robert Epstein a Harvard trained psychologist our third a study recently that showed Google's biased likely swung 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election Google could well elect the next president with dire implications for our democracy this should be a real concern to all but the most politically partisan those at the top set the tone it will require a Herculean effort by the chief executive and senior management to change the political bias now programmed into the company's culture and mr. Poojah let me ask my first question about those examples of political bias that I just mentioned and you're gonna hear others too in your opening statement you mentioned your desire to provide information that was without political bias clearly that's not working so what are you going to improve that situation congressman thanks for the question if I mean some of the studies you mentioned we have investigated those there are other studies which have looked at it we have found issues with the methodology and the sample size and so on but let me step back and say providing users with high-quality accurate and trusted information is sacrosanct to us it's what our principles are under business interests our natural long-term incentives are aligned with that we want to serve users everywhere and we need to earn their trust in doing so so so what actions are you going to take to try to counter the poll local bias and some of those examples that I just gave I mean they're irrefutable so it occurs you have to take some responsibility for that bias what do you intend to do about it congressman with respect a doctor abstained study we investigated we don't agree with the methodology happy to follow up with your office and give our findings on that on the study but when we look at it we evaluate our studies to evaluate our search results today we use a very robust methodology and if we've been doing this for 20 years making sure the results are accurate is what we need to do well and we work hard to do that what his methodology had to do with the fact that 96% of the references to Trumper from liberal media there are always studies you know which can show what one one set of data and arrive at conclusions but we have looked at results on our top news category we find that we have a wide variety of sources including sources from the left and sources from the right and we are committed to making sure this diverse perspectives by the way the study that I referred to was done by a self-proclaimed Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and said he regretted to find what he found but he felt it was irrefutable and no one has been able to disprove him let me go to another question and that is clearly there may be a difference of opinion as to the degree or amount of political bias would you agree to allow an independent entity to study your search results for political bias I know you've have individuals studying that now but you appointed them would you allow and third party independent outside organization to study your search results and cooperate with them to determine the degree or if any of political bias almost money if I may make two points one is today there have been independent third-party studies looking at search results the economists but you chose those third parties I'm talking about someone truly independent we didn't choose those third parties I mean they completed those studies the second is via transparent as to how we evaluate search we publish our rater guidelines we publish it externally and graters evaluate it and that's how we we are trying hard to understand what users want and and this is something important to us to get right I'm happy to follow up and explain the methodology and the studies which have been done by independent third parties okay to my knowledge again you have picked those third parties and I'd like to have someone truly independent study those results number one number two also to my knowledge you've never sanctioned any employee for any type of for manipulating the research results whatsoever is that the case the time of the gentleman has expired but mr. pitch I will be allowed to answer question and very quickly it's not possible for an individual employee or groups of employee to manipulate our search results you know we have a robust framework including many steps in the process well and my time is up let me just say I disagree I think humans can manipulate the process is a human process at his face Thank You mr. chairman yield back chair recognizes the gentlewoman from California Miss Lofgren for five minutes Thank You mr. chairman and thank you for being here mr. Boucher Google is located in Santa Clara County my home and I've got to say that you know in contrast to the recent Amazon effort for a headquarters they are proposing Google's proposing to establish a facility in downtown San Jose and they didn't ask for any tax subsidies in fact they're purchasing the land and paying the city gobs of money I'm going to be parochial and ask a question because I think most people in in San Jose are excited by the proposal but there's anxiety about the impact on housing and whether Google intends to be a partner with the city of San Jose to make sure that we accommodate the housing that will be necessary for the 20,000 additional employees that are proposed in San Jose sorry I missed the last part of your question whether you would be a partner with the city in helping to provide additional housing to accommodate these employees congressman it's an important question we deeply care about the community very very work as part of this effort we have done wide treat and we have committed to making sure there is affordable housing at varying affordability levels as part of as part of the development is already in touch with city leaders there thank you so much you know there's so many questions and we're not going to be able to deal with them all today I'm hoping in the next Congress we will be able to visit with you and other tech companies to go through issues of privacy data localization and its relationship to human rights competition policies the issue of takedown requests by authoritarian regimes encryption policy and what's going on in Australia filtering and confirmation bias and its impact on society generally both culturally and politically but we don't can't do that in the five minutes we have here today so I would just like to revisit some of the questions that have already been asked the Chairman asked about location policies in your Android system and you pointed to various apps that might provide information let's say I got an Android phone but not unlike most people I don't have a single app on that phone what information would be collected Congresswoman there is a there is a device specific location setting which which you can turn on or off and say I turn it off turn it off there's no location information sent from that device okay but this is a complex area there are times for example your IP address may include some location information fact it's an area we are committed to doing more to make it easier now manipulation of search results I think it's important to talk about how search works right now if you google the word idiot under images a picture of Donald Trump comes up I just did that how would that happen how does search work so that that would occur we provide search tree for anytime you type in a keyword we as Google we have crawled we've gone out and crawled and stored billion copies of billions of their pages in our index and we take the keyword and match it against web pages and rank them based on over 200 signals things like relevance freshness popularity how other people are using it and based on that you know at any given time we try to rank and find the best results for that query and then we evaluate them at external readers to make sure that and they evaluated to objective guidelines and and that's how we make sure the process is well it's not some little man sitting behind the curtain figuring out what we're going to show the user it's basically a compilation of what users are generating and trying to sort through that information last year we sold over 3 trillion searches and just just as a fact every single day 15 percent of the searches Google sees we've never seen them before so so this is working at scale and you know we don't you know manually intervene on any particular search yourself I I would just like to note from time to time my colleagues on the other side of the aisle complained that they hear an individual engineer appears to be a Democrat and I just like to put this in context in Santa Clara County Donald Trump in the in the 2016 election got 20% of the vote that's how much of the vote he got so it's not a surprise that the engineers who live in Santa Clara County would reflect that general political outcome that has nothing to do with the algorithms and the really automated process that is the search engine that serves us you know if we didn't have Google we wouldn't be able to find any information in in the efficient way that we do I look forward next year to working with you on some of the very serious questions that we face it's pretty obvious that bias against conservative voices is not one of them thank you very much my time is expired mr. chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio mr. Chabot for five minutes Thank You mr. chairman and mr. Pichardo me start out with something real quickly we've heard several times this morning the mention that 90% of the time that a person he or she does an internet search that it's through google would you basically agree that that's that's true more than ever there are many ways to use this access information just to give an example if you if you're trying to shop if you're trying to buy something more than 50% of product searches originated with Amazon in the u.s. today if you're looking for information on on news today you can get it from more sources than ever before do you dispute them the 90% number you know our internal I mean it's tough for us to assess the numbers there are external studies which have shown different numbers including lower numbers than that okay now you've heard the allegation this morning I know you dispute it but you've heard the allegation that there's a bias in favor of liberal or progressive points of view and against more conservative point you've heard that this morning already is that correct yes I'm okay let me tell you now about a first-hand experience that I've had I do a weekly blog I've been doing it for the better part of nine years now and a while back Republicans in the House passed legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare our bill was called the American Health Care Act or the AHCA when I was writing my blog about that I googled American Health Care Act and virtually every article was an attack on our bill article after article alleging that our bill would result in millions and millions of people losing the great care that they were supposedly getting under Obamacare I would argue that was completely false but it wasn't until you got to the third or fourth page of search results before you found anything remotely positive about our bill let me give you a second example the Republican tax cut bill was passed a year ago the tax cuts in Jobs Act same story article after article attacking the Republican tax cut plan alleging the tax cuts only went to the rich when in actuality about eighty-five percent of taxpayers got their taxes cut including millions and millions of middle-class taxpayers and once again to find any article that had anything remotely good to say about our plan you had to go deep into the into the search results now I know Google's attitude the algorithm made us do it but I don't know that I buy that how do you explain this apparent bias on Google's part against conservative points of view against conservative policies is it just the algorithm or czar more happening there congressman I understand the frustration at seeing negative news and you know I see it on me on Google's there are times you can search on Google and page after page there's negative news which we deflect but what what is important here is we use a robust methodology to reflect what is being said about any given topic at any particular time and we try to do it objectively using a set of rubrics it is in our interest to make sure we reflect what's happening out there in the best objective manner possible I can commit to you and I can assure you we do it without regards to political ideology our algorithms have no notion of political central you know I'm gonna run out of time here I apologize for interrupting but and and I and I sincerely believe that that you believe what you're saying here but you've got almost 90,000 employees somebody out there is doing something that that just isn't working if you're looking for unbiased results and I've seen this firsthand time after time I just mentioned two of the most obvious ones that people would remember yell those bills heard about those so I'd see if what is what I've described and some of it I'm sure you're gonna hear other example if it is happening do you see how concern believe that your company is kind of putting their thumb on the scale so to speak that you're in effect picking winners and losers in political discourse out there in America today and therefore actually affecting elections and and do you see why conservatives would be concerned about this and why we're asking these kinds of questions today there's a lot of people that think what I'm saying here is happening and I think it's happening so I've only got about 20 seconds to go but I'll you'll do congressman it's important to me that I understand these consents this is why I've been trying to reach out and meet people we've done outreach we want to explain how these things work we are happy to look at independent studies it's important to us to demonstrate that our products work without any bias and and we build our products in a neutral way and I'm happy to follow up and look forward to you know getting a chance to explain it better thank you very much and I appreciate your willingness to follow up because there's I think a lot of people have a lot of questions and I know I'm already out of time but let me also thank Google for one thing I happen to be chair of the House Small Business Committee and your company has worked with an awful lot of small businesses all across the country create a lot of jobs and I commend you for that yo back chair recognizes the gentleman from Georgia sorry the gentlewoman from Texas mr. Jackson Lee for five minutes good morning mr. birch I am I'm right here it's a pleasure to have you here this morning I'm going to try and answer very or offer to you questions initially that require just say yes or no answer if you would does google choose conservative voices over liberal voices we approach a work without any political bias we build it in a neutral way answer is no yes or no no if hate speech provokes violence is that the definition beyond other aspects that you consider that you would take it down I know there are other aspects but particularly encouraging violence does that get taken down in primary purpose of inciting violence is what we constrast hate-speech yes congressman and it would be taken down yes we would remove I want to just take note of the fact that I look forward to best practices when we start the hundred and sixteenth Congress in terms of having more hearings my view is that this committee has washed his hands clean of engaging in meaningful oversight of technology platform efforts to sift through content being sold by hostile foreign actors actors claiming to heighten social division at the peril of democracy I won't ask a question on that but I will make mention of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 12 which says no one should be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy and has been noted that Google does engage in reviewing emails would you commit to adhering to article 12 of the Declaration of Human Rights relates to protecting the privacy of individual emails you know we think privacy is an important individual right it's an important human right and and we have committed to upholding that and happy to engage in any discussions with respect to that I'd like to do so we know that building the US economy through innovation is very important I would like to know whether or not you would be open to Google involving the AI economy to non-traditional areas of social economic groups data shows the impact of not having that access would you be welcome or would you welcome invitations to those communities to do more than what has been done definitely absolutely yes you received a letter from the Senate a few weeks ago regarding illegal drug sales it's quite extensive and my question is have you made any efforts to deal with the facilitating of sale of counterfeit substandard and falsified medicines sold through illegal online pharmacies congressman this is a national crisis we have undertaken a lot of work in this area we we just recently rolled out we participated in national take back day in google.maps free short drop-off locations we work with law enforcement here and just last week we received a corporate citizenship evolved from partnership for drug-free America and we are very committed to doing more work in this area we applauded you in 2010 when Google took a very powerful stand of the principle and democratic values over profits and came out of China I am concerned that you are now going back into China and upholding the dragonfly procedures which would help censor Chinese persons seeking a lifeline of democracy and freedom how can you do that and what are you doing to minimize or to indicate that this is not the best practices congressmen are doubt said right now we have no plans to launch in China we have we don't have a search product there or our core mission is to provide users access to information and getting access to information is an important human right so we are always compelled across the world to try hard to provide that information and but right now there are no plans to launch search in China I'm committed to being fully transparent including with policymakers to the extent we ever develop plans to do that I'd like to pursue that with you and I thank you for that I think there was an important statement my community is diverse as you will may have heard the Congressional Black Caucus has been working extensively with Google and other search engines to recognize her not enough individuals of diversity and African Americans my district has a huge number of musicians artists and creators from all areas of entertainment I'd be interested in what efforts are being taken by Google's platform YouTube to promote diversity inclusion with his employees what are the demographics of u2's u.s. employees and also how is YouTube currently distributing resources for us diversity but the focus is on diversity what are you doing YouTube is a great message and there is a whole population growing of diverse persons including African Americans diversity is native we are very committed to YouTube as you highlighted is a platform where as we reach out to content creators we want to ensure there is diverse perspectives and we do reach out to minority communities and we engage with them to make sure they have a voice on the platform it's something we are committed to doing as a company we are we have been undertaking a lot of work we were one of the first to publish a transparency report we publish our representation numbers externally there is a lot more work left to do we acknowledge that but it's an area you know we were engaged with the Congressional Black Caucus and we're committed to doing more let me invite you to Texas and the 18th congressional district on these very important issues and I'd like to work with Google as we go forward on some of the many issues that I've raised here today it would be a pleasure to do that thank you very much mr. chairman I'd like to put into the record a letter from epic org dated December 10 2018 ask unanimous consent mr. chairman out objection and let me thank the witness for his testimony thank you also for your work here thanks gentlemen recognized the gentleman from California mr. Issa for five minutes Thank You mr. chairman chari I would like to follow up on some of the gentlemen that came before me on this side of the dais who talked about the the bias and and I know that the gentlelady from Texas and some of the others said there is no bias but I'd like to pick up where Sheila jackson-lee just left off because I think it's important she used numbers and out outcome that she either has or believes exist to say that you have to do better in the minority community do you agree with that as a company we have committed to making sure no no but statistically the outcome that she measures is how she asks you to do better because your outcome is insufficient relative the size of her community do you agree with that you know I interpreted as we today don't have enough representation internally very good you got her point now here's the point that I think we're giving if you measure the outcome such as some of those that were just listed by the gentleman from Texas in Ohio what you find is that there is an appearance of bias including quite frankly the outcome search engines even the question of whether if I pay for advertising and my Democratic opponent pays for advertising the if the characteristic of what we happen to search for somehow is more expensive if you're trying to get conservative and Republican those are outcome events will you commit to look in the case of political potential political bias in all aspects of your very large company to look at the outcome measure the outcome and see if in fact there is evidence of bias using that and then work backwards to see if some of that can be evened to what would appropriately be the outcome do you see my point there congressman I understand we don't want any unconfident we don't approach our work with any political bias I think it's important to me that we always look at outcomes and the assess to make sure there is no evidence of bias and the reason I give you this point for most of my adult life there have been laws on the book to stop the events that Miss Jackson Lee speaks of we have had laws to protect minority communities we have had laws to protect against segregation and bias and yet there are measurements that are still being used including quite frankly we create districts that are dedicated to minorities in this country under federal orders because of a history or a measurement of outcome and I would ask you to seriously come back commit to measure and when you find an outcome that is inconsistent with that which would be ordinarily predictable I mean we are two parties relatively tied in the outcome of elections on a global on a national basis if that outcome doesn't come out similar than in fact you have the evidence to work backwards and see if in fact policies can be found which are causing that artificially in which by the way might include an overzealous liberal crowd that simply spends more time Republicans then vice versa that might be what you find but unless you look at the outcome you're always gonna say well we seem to be fair but the outcome measured by my colleagues will in fact not work out congressman I I think it's a valid point I appreciate it and happy to engage more and follow up on it I want to get through just two more quick things in your opening statement and in the questions you've asked you have talked about turning off location and other data collection and there are two things that I'm concerned about can you commit as you go through generation 15 16 17 of your software to improve the dashboard the transparency in the tools available to teach people how to protect their privacy how to offload data how to in fact turn off things they may not want to have in order to gain privacy it's an area we want to do better you know one of knowledge just as the company has grown a lot you know there is there's complexity and you know it's something I do think we can do better you know more than other come we do today show clear dashboards with the data and give controls but we want to simplify it make it easier for average users to navigate these settings and and it's something we are working on and I will tell you each time I try to turn it on and off refreshing my memory is a pain because there is no simple place to go to find out how to do it but the reality as I agree that you do have a dashboard most don't I ask unanimous consent now that an article from The Wall Street Journal October 8th of 2018 be placed in the record at objection and in that article it talks about that the user data bleep beat breach and it also makes us aware that there's a memorandum at Google and that memorandum has been requested by multiple members of Congress including Senator Thune would you commit to provide that memorandum to Congress so that we can know more about the internal workings related to this breach you know I'm happy to have my office follow up on it I'm not fully aware of all the specifics there but definitely and commit to following up at your office on it thank you Thank You mr. chairman yield back Jerry thanks gentlemen who recognizes the gentleman from Tennessee mr. Cohen for five minutes Thank You mr. chair howdy first I'd like to follow up with was Trice it was talking about I use your apparatus often or your search engine and I don't understand all of the different ways that you can turn off the locations at there's so many different things have you considered having an online school that people could go to with a Google rep and you could kind of log in and kind of ask questions or have Google and and not like Comcast where you get put on hold for 30 minutes and then find somebody who you can't understand something easy to talk to somebody and say how do I do this or that congressman we're constantly looking for better ways to do it one of the areas is giving online tutorials and we haven't specifically looked at an option like that but I'm happy to take that feedback today we do remind people of privacy checkups and we walk them through a flow around 20 million people come to it every day and so we do its online though that's online but it but you don't have individuals I find it's a lot easier to talk to somebody you know this is what I want because the other thing is frustrating but if you could look into that I think what helped privacy is something I think many people and myself included are interested in but sometimes it's difficult to use the device to get that definitely you said that you can turn off your location history but that still your IP address will track your information is that correct alignment not just common to Google today many Internet companies do collect and sometimes store IP information for security reasons for example we need to know the language in which we serve your search results there may be some location information you know in their location turns out to be in the fabric of how people use Internet today I don't think it's important there is legislation in this area as a company we want to try and simplify things and be state-of-the-art but it is a complex area we realize we need to do better and be working on question about Russia in recent months authoritarian regimes most prominently Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia seems to have first place there's a Heisman winner of that have used bots to manipulate YouTube's algorithms and to restricting the accessibility of online content from democratic and human rights with the gentleman suspend sure the individual who has stopped the provided us with a poster will remove that immediately from the room or they could we have the doors closed could we have the doors closed that police will escort the gentleman out of the building yeah like how many USC football game and shiver them absolutely Thanks gentleman is recognized can I get 20 more seconds right yes without objection all right so in recent months authoritarian regimes most prominently Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia have used BOTS to manipulate YouTube's algorithms into restricting the accessibility of online content from democratic and human rights activists by piling up tens of thousands of artificial dislikes to their videos I'm aware human rights activists had met with representatives of Google to discuss this problem and find a way of amending the algorithms to prevent this abuse authoritarian regimes but so far no systemic solution has been found YouTube is the main platform for democratic and human rights activists and authoritarian countries where the mainstream media are controlled by the governments this results in YouTube algorithms as they currently operate putting up barriers to the distribution of such content what is YouTube and Google currently doing to address this problem congressman both YouTube and Google are really committed to freedom of expression we do want to be a platform by which people can get their messages out and and and we work hard to do that and you know I'm not sure of all the specifics in that particular case but happy to follow but in general we work hard we operate around the world part of the reason we do it is so that we can be a platform by which people can get their messages out and including human rights activists there is there are ways that BOTS could influence the algorithm by going in and disliking or whatever that not right you know to out our systems we deal with you know spam bots and lots of many many kinds it's what we worked hard many years to make sure we can counter with several measures in place we did at these activities and we respond strongly to follow up on this should I talk I heard on television this morning MSNBC said you have almost 200 lobbyists and it's amazing that they all look like a Don but but should I just talk to one of the add-ons and ask him to get with you on this issue we'll definitely have our office follow up thank you sir and by the way as far as MSNBC would be a news I mean if you're on MSNBC wouldn't that be in your news it's MSNBC news providers study Allison so if you put it like I put my name in here Rep Steve : I punched news this weekend I was on MSNBC four times and yet with first thing that comes up is the Daily Caller not exactly a liberal and I guess well-known group dens roll called then Breitbart news then the Memphis Business Journal then Breitbart news in Breitbart so it looks like you are overly using conservative news organizations on your news and I'd like you to look in the over use of conservative news organizations to put on liberal people's news on Google and if you let me know about that I appreciate it you know we do get consent so cross both sides of the aisle you know I can I can assure you we do this in a neutral way and we do this based on that specific keyword what we are able to assess as the most relevant information and I'm sure you try to it's hard for me to fathom being on MSNBC for like eight minutes each show four times and there's there's more content on Breitbart news than MSNBC that might say something about well I'm not gonna say that scary thank you sir chair recognizes the gentleman from Ohio mr. Jordan for five minutes Thank You mr. chairman mr. pichai in your opening statement you said I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products operate that way Ileana Murillo is Google's head of multicultural marketing does miss Murillo do good work I'm not directly familiar with her work but she's an employee of Google and you know be proud of her employees well you praised her work the day after the 2016 election in a four-page email she wrote about her work with the Latino vote she said even sundar gave our effort a shout-out is she referring to you there she was referring to my communication around translation for a different related effort okay well I'm gonna look at two other sentences she had that long email again recapping her work in the 2016 election with the Latino vote she said this we pushed to get out the Latino vote with our features a few lines down and her email she qualified that sentence and she said we pushed to get out the Latino vote with our features in key states and she specifically cites the states Florida and Nevada near the end of her email in a similar sentence she says we supported partners like voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states with me I want to kind of analyze those two sentences we push to get out the Latino vote with our features in key states we supported partners like voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states is a fair to say that we in both sentences Mr Pichai refers to Google congressman we we are very concerned whenever there are allegations like that we we are team look at that question I'm asking is it fair to say that we in both sentences refers to the company Google as Google we wouldn't participate in any partisan efforts around any civic process so okay I don't think so so this is so we pushed and we supported partner like voted Latino to paper rides and pulse in key states and we push to get out the Latino vote during the 2016 election and how were they getting that done they were getting that done by according to miss Morello your head of multicultural marketing by altering your features or configuring your features in such a way and for paying for rides for people to get to the polls is that an accurate reading of those that's all I'm asking is that does that fair to say what those sentences are talking about not about of all the specifics but we did look into it we found no evidence that you know any activity like that from Google - it said organization so she's not telling the truth for sure we didn't find any supporting evidence of any such activity he said she paid for rides to the polls and they configured their features in such a ways to get out the Latino vote and look I actually think that's all okay right I think that that's just a good corporate citizen encouraging voter participation encouraging people to participate in our election process I think so far those sentences are just fine but then there's three words at the end of each sentence that do cause me real concern and those three words are we push to get out the Latino vote with our features in key states now suddenly gets political we supported partners like voto Latino to pay for rides to the polls in key states now that makes everything different so I got really just one question for you why why why why did Google configure its features and pay for rides to the polls to get out the Latino vote only in key states congressman Issa said earlier we found no evidence to substantiate those claims the only effort we do around elections though you're a head of multicultural marketing who you praised her work in this email gave her a shout out was lying when she said you were trying to get out the Latino vote in key states we today in the u.s. our own elections we make it and this is what users look to us for where to register toward where to find your nearest polling place what are the hours they are open and we do those things effectively I appreciate that mr. pitch I already I already said that's just that's being a good good corporate citizen what I'm asking is why did you only do it in key states we didn't do any such activity as Google on any of these key states I mean there are employees I think they are parties did you push to get out the Latino vote in all states as Google we don't have goals around pushing out to get any particular segments we don't participate in partisan activities we engage with both campaigns we support and sponsor debates across both sides of the aisle and we provide users with information to if you're head of multicultural marketing said you were pushing to get out the Latino vote paying for ride to the poll to the polls for the Latino vote only in key states and you're saying that's not accurate yes that's right we haven't found any evidence to substantiate it she just made it up out of thin air the day after the election I wrote this email to your top executives and it's not true congressman I'm happy to follow up but I think the employees today do their own active you don't want to follow up I want the real answers right here in this committee as I said earlier we've looked into it we didn't find you push to get out the key vote and and I would say the two most populous states for Latinos would be California and Texas did you push to get out the Latino vote and pay for people to go to the polls in California and Texas we as a company dint of any effort to push out words for any particular demographic that would be against our principles we participate in the civic process in an in a in a non-partisan way and we think it's really important we do it that way well I just think it's interesting mr. chairman I know I'm over time but I think it's interesting that their head of multicultural marketing writes an email the day after the election where she talks about 71% of a Latino votes voted for Hillary but that wasn't enough and she talks about paying for rides to the polls in key states for Latino votes to get out the Latino vote in key states and the head of the company says that's not accurate the time of the gentleman has expired the witness may answer the question chairman I think it's important for us and we are happy to follow but congressman there and we haven't found any evidence to substantiate those allegations does miss Morello still work for the company it's it's my understanding she does yes sir she recognizes the gentleman from Georgia mr. Johnson for five minutes Thank You mr. mr. Boucher have you ever heard talk of this email that you were just asked about by your head of multicultural marketing not at that time but later you know and there was concerns expressed around it I was made is it is it true that she said that email or could that be fake news my understanding is that there were emails that you're sent like the congressman referred to but it's your testimony today that Google did not configure its features to get out the Latino vote in key states we don't build partisan features or features with any goals around affecting elections in those ways we mainly focus our efforts on helping people register to vote and our you know we we reach users across the United States so anytime we do these efforts informing people where to vote these are used in a very distributed way widely across the entire country all right thank you sir in google's collection and use of consumers data and its record of protecting consumers and their data appropriate areas of congressional oversight but sadly this committee has neglected consumer protection as an area of oversight choosing instead to squander their oversight responsibilities and use its power so as to bully google and other technology companies in to minimizing negative news and comments about Republicans and most importantly the Trump administration yesterday Google disclosed that private profile data of over 52 million users users may have been exposed I understand there you're phasing out the Google+ platform but many Americans trust your email platform and countless other products with their personal information and you admit that you collect private data for use in advertising how can we be assured considering this new breach that the personally identifiable information of consumers is safe with you congressman it's an important question this is why we undertake all these efforts we do operate important products like Gmail the reasons you know building software inevitably has bugs associated as part of the process we actually undertake a lot of efforts to find bugs and so we find it we root it out and we fix it and that's how we constantly make our systems better and you know the biggest area of risk we normally you know we see for our users is around security that you know their account gets hacked or something that's why we work hard Gmail is an area where we've invested a lot we have an advanced protection program I would encourage members of the Congress to sign up for it if you're using Gmail it allows the second layer of protection to your account which makes it you know much much harder to get your account you know misappropriated in any way all right thank you yesterday the New York Times published an in-depth investigation of your location tracking applications that SIL purportedly identified excuse me personally identified data Google has said that it doesn't sell data but as a corporation deeply involved in the business of consumer data use in advertising your company benefits from applications that track consumer locations how do you differentiate what Google does with geolocation all data from companies with applications that track and sell the data it's a company we do not sell user data that would be against our principles and how how do you differentiate what you do with the geolocation data from companies that do sell the data how do you how do you differentiate what you do with that data versus what these applications that do track and sale that data do important source of differentiation we do Norden would never sell user data we do give consumers preferences about how the data is used for advertising most of our user experience are we make our advertising relevant based on the keywords you type and that's where we get most of our information we do you can just type and control your ad settings into Google and you can actually change you know the use of your personal data for advertising as well we allow that as an option user time expires let me ask you do you believe Google has done enough to be transparent in its data collecting policies you know we we always think there is more to do it's an area which is going to be an ongoing area of effort for us but we have invested a lot over the years and we do make it very transparent and we encourage users to go check it out and in fact every day 20 million users go and check it and over the last month around 170 million users did check it but we're going to continue and invest more in this area thank you are you back the chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas mr. Poe for five minutes Thank You mr. chairman I'm over here on this side I have an iPhone and if I move from here and go over there and sit with my Democrat friends which will make them real nervous does Google track my movement does Google through this phone know that I have moved here and moved over to the left it's either yes or no not by default there may be a Google service but you've opted into use and if so Google knows that I am moving over there it's not a trick question you know you make a hundred million dollars a year you ought to be able to answer that question does Google know through this phone that I am moving over there and sitting next to mr. Johnson which would make him real nervous it's his question it's yes or no I wouldn't be able to answer that I'm looking at can't say yes or no without knowing more details sir if I walk over there and sit next to mr. Johnson and carry my phone does Google know that I was sitting here and then I moved over the you're welcome anytime judge yes or no I genuinely don't know without knowing those shocks that don't know I think Google obviously does are you familiar with the general data protection regulation by the European Union very familiar we've looked over 18 months on it and the European Union is protecting the right of privacy of the people in Europe we don't have such a law in the United States do it congressman we've supported and we do not have such a law in the United States do we if we don't have a comprehensive user data privacy there are you familiar without in resolution 1039 it's a resolution that I've introduced that would basically adopt some of the European practices in America and give consumers in the United States the right of privacy are you familiar with that legislation no but I'm how to give you a cop before you leave it's ironic to me that the United States supposed to be the country in the world that protects privacy of individuals more than anybody else we are playing second fiddle to the Europeans they protect the privacy of their folks more than we do and I think the United States Congress needs to move in a direction to to allow citizens to opt in to the dissemination of their information rather than opt out which seems to be the current law as mr. Cohen has stated I think most Americans don't know all the things that this phone can do and one thing that it can do is disseminate information really that we are unaware of to all different people out there United States should change the rules and make it so that we as consumers opt-in otherwise that information is not disseminated that is just just my opinion what does Google view as objectionable I think there are if you're referring to our content policies we do we do publish there are areas for example categories for YouTube like violent extremism pornography child safety fraudulent activities so we define categories what our extreme political views you you find those objectionable not saying you shouldn't I'm just saying what are those extreme political views we don't we think it's important Google and YouTube are platforms which are of its support what are those extreme political views that you find objectionable we don't define any political views as objectionable you let all political views come on even objectionable or political views we have areas which we have defined as not allowed on our platforms for example on YouTube there are clear definitions around hate speech but it's defined as speech with just a primary goal of inciting hatred or violence to its groups of people you would agree that hate speech has many different definitions depending on who's doing the defining wouldn't you agree we we understand it's a subjective area could be open to interpretation but we define it and we publish our definition of it and we do you believe that Google as then has been brought out here and some question is biased congressman it's really important to me that we approach our work in an unbiased you believe that Google is biased it's either yes or no no no not in our approach it is a private company is it not yes it is it's not the government Google is not the government is it not lost a check no you want the government to regulate Google today we are subject to a lot of regulation across many different agencies but you're not subject to the definition of what bias is by the government coming in and saying Google cannot be biased and we the government are going to decide what's bias and what's not bias you're not subject to that philosophy or you know not today I hope we don't get to that point where government tries to come in and and regulate what bias is and because it is this is a an independent free company I think that that is you know Google may have to me it's just the part of it doing business like any other media outlet they can say what they want I've gone over time mr. Chairman I have some other questions I'd like to submit for the record well mr. chairman if I might the gentleman is certainly welcome to join me on this side of the aisle that's which part is at any time getting a little late in his career I will just respond to the gentleman from Texas and say that we will be submitting questions in writing to you mr. Boucher including the ones from the gentleman from Texas and we would ask that you answer them promptly be very happy to thank you very much the chair now recognizes gentleman from Florida mr. Deutsch for five minutes Thank You mr. chairman mr. Chaddha I believe that the platform's can and should do a better job preventing people from using services to engage in illegal activity Tim Cook recently said platforms and algorithms that promise to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies some of your peers are publicly reckoning with the ways their companies are not neutral platforms and are accountable for the content on the services in congressional testimony Mark Zuckerberg said his company is responsible for the content on its platform and a Washington Post interview Hoover CEO Derek Oscar Shahi said we have to stand for the content of our platforms we can't just say we're a platform and our job is done mr. Fitch I will you in front of our committee the sworn he join your peers and affirm that Google is accountable for the content on your platforms we are we have a commitment to our users to provide accurate and trustworthy information high quality information IRA's worked up all those commitments I'll take that as yes I want to return to that privacy discussion that's gone on and I wish I went to the to do a privacy check out while we're sitting here and you're right it's it's quite good but I want to talk about what it does and what it doesn't do and and perhaps you can help me work through this a little bit I my settings down on Google my location history is paused my device information is paused my voice and audio activity are paused my YouTube watch history is paused that's probably a good thing in my youtube search history is pause that said it doesn't mean that you're not collecting data on me does it I think if you for those categories if you possibly stop collecting I understand but overall it doesn't mean that you're not you've stopped collecting data you're still collecting data on search you're still collecting data in ways that can that can help advertising and help provide the services that you provide I appreciate that my question is this I wanted to focus also on the New York Times article about the what they refer to as the mobile location industry and and I I understand the way that data is collected when you talk on your website about about searching Google getting directions for maps to watch of it watching videos and YouTube you collect data to make services work better I understand that but data is also collected to use in advertising and according to the New York Times story it's a hot market sales of location targeted advertising reaching an estimated 21 billion dollars this year it talks about your company and Facebook dominating the mobile ad market that also lead in location-based advertising and it says that Google also receives precise location information from apps that use its ad services can you explain that to me is the New York Times saying that if there is any company that uses your ad services and given the dominant place that you play in advertising that would be I would imagine most if there is any company that uses your advertising then that data that they collect would also be available to you ultimately the data they collect on me is the question I'm asking so we as a company and you know we have commitments to you we view data as belonging to use as we as to its of it so we don't transmit personal data to advertisers if I know I I understand that I'm asking about the I'm asking about the data that companies because the the New York Times said that that Google receives precise location information from apps that use its ad service my question is do you receive information as New York Times right do you receive information about the locations that I travel from from companies who use your advertising service you know I just want to make sure I understand the specifics but there may be information so for example if we are providing an ad and and let's say it's for a restaurant we normally would do it in the location near you so that it's relevant for you you have an option to turn that setting off but if it is since we are providing that information we would be aware of it it's not coming from that company to us but you know but that's what that's what I want to understand if if the ad if a company uses your advertising does their location sharing get to you and here's why let me just cut cuz I have a lot of time The Times talks about the information isn't tied to someone's name or phone number your personal information as you define it seems to be name email address and billing information the question a lot of us have mr. coach I think you can sense is that while that may be personal information and you treat that and you treat that the way we would expect that there is a lot of information about where we go and where we are at any moment that can as the Times points out allow someone with access to the raw data including employees or clients to identify a person without their consent by following some of the new pinpointing a phone that regularly spent time at that person's home address can you use the locations that people go to identify to back into who a person is you wouldn't do it but could someone else do that same thing we wouldn't do that without use explicit use of consent to answer your question you know I'm happy to follow up I want to make sure I address that it's a specific question I think at a high level I would say location is turning out to be an important area as we consider privacy legislation I you know I think it's important we give location production for our users as a company we want to lead the way and we are I have to you have to give I just one last question is charity the gentleman has expired the chair recognizes the gentleman from Pennsylvania mr. Marino Thank You chairman and thank you for being here all of you let me start out by saying that sir you and your office every company I think particularly you because you are at the helm have a tremendous responsibility responsibility towards your employees responsibility towards your stockholders to your company providing jobs and we thank you for providing jobs but I think you also have a much more awesome responsibility to the American people to make sure that you educate accurately to make sure that you stay in the middle of the road because I've learned this over the years as a prosecutor and more so as a member of Congress there is a lot of people who believe everything that's put out by anyone we're a ten-second society now and we can't hold conversations we can only read you know 10 or 12 words and that's supposedly the gospel you have a responsibility to see that the truth is out there and I hold you to doing that I don't believe in the government taking control or defining as my friend the judge says what is right and what is wrong I for one the less federal government in my life the better so I am depending on you and companies like your company help us along the lines because if the federal government does ever step in to regulate you're not going to like it and that said I have a concern concerning China in 2010 Google left the Chinese market place due to concerns over hack hacking the tax censorship and how the Chinese government was possibly gaining ax to data I'm interested in what has changed since 2010 and how working with the Chinese government to censor research results are part of Google's core values do you understand my question congressman we right now there are no plans for us to launch a search product in China we are in general always looking to see how best it's part of our core mission and our principles to try hard to provide users with information we we always have evidence based on every country we have operated and us reaching out and giving users to more information has a very positive impact and and we feel that calling but right now there are no plans to launch in China to the extent that we we ever you know approach a decision like that I I will be fully transparent including with policy makers here and and engage in consult widely a mind then to understand that there's you have no plans to enter into any agreements with China concerning google how it's used in China we currently do not have a search product there and so you know you plan on having a search product there right now there are no plans to launch a search product in China let me ask it this way if in the future you decide to do that what information would you share with the Chinese concerning other users other countries any time we look to operate in a country I mean we would you know we would look at what what the conditions are to operate there are times in the past we have debated the conditions to operate and and we explore a wide range of possibilities currently it is an effort only internally for us there we are not doing this in China and so you know but I happy to consult back and be transparent direction we planned something there I'm sure you are aware that right now there are thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of people that the Chinese government has on computers trying to hack in the US and any other countries same thing taking place so to a lesser degree in in Russia simply because of the population what what can google do to help curtail that if not eliminate countries from hacking into other countries as a company we have faced significant attacks before so you know protecting the security of our uses is what really keeps me up at night and it's something we invest a lot over the years we work with law enforcement because we rely on their intelligence to help us assess threats but it's a comprehensive effort and and it's something we take seriously thank you remember the responsibility that I think you have she recognized the gentlewoman from California miss bast for five minutes Thank You mr. chair and thank you for coming today I wanted to follow up on some questions that were asked of you earlier specifically the use of BOTS by authoritarian regimes and also the use of troll farms by Russia and wanted to know if you could be more specific in terms of how Google is going to respond in other words will you expand your staff or modify their algorithms in an effort to identify and eradicate the online trolls and then in terms of the flooding that takes place with BOTS what specifically will you do to address this this is something we actually face across the set of products we do today beat our ad systems be it our search products people are trying to spam and be it YouTube and so on so in general we've built systems over the years to detect anomalous traffic patterns and and and mitigate that and we also learned we collaborate with others law enforcement has been very helpful to us in this regard so if they so the example of the other BOTS where you have I mean I saw one example where there was one day a hundred and twenty five dislikes in the next day there were eighty four thousand how do you respond in a situation like that words obviously it's done purposely so when we see viewcount manipulation manipulation of likes dislikes and either we get reports or we deduct in our systems spikes in those activities which you know which make it clear that it's it's not humans doing it you know we deducted we treated as spam or abuse of our systems you have staff dedicated to looking at that yeah but we have our algorithms AI systems and manual reviewers and and we are staffing up our manual reviewers significantly over the past couple of years and so we do it comprehensively across all those things so anticipating what took place in 2016 happening again and and this is specifically regarding what Russia did to foment racial tensions in the United States and wanting to know how you are responding to that were they called for you know fake protests either to get african-americans to turn out to protest something that was fake or to have white supremists be ginned up to attack communities of color so specifically what is Google doing to respond to that we mainly saw with respect to Russia limited improper activity on our ad platforms but in general you know we are not a social networking company across the products we do it's an area we haven't done well as a company so we typically are in connecting groups of people and that's not how Google mainly works today and so we haven't seen that kind of activities on our platforms but we are vigilant and you know I'm happy to share any findings which come through as we look into it more so I just wanted to ask you a couple of question about online creators of color where mainstream media outlets often fail to cater to communities of color with relatable content or resolve lingering issues of under-representation or misrepresentation communities of color have sought out digital mediums to tell their stories and in some cases this has been very successful and it's led to larger networks recognizing the talent and in other cases it's given a platform to voices that would otherwise be silenced so I wanted to know what policies Google might be developing to put in place to ensure that the voice of online creators can expand youtuber has a lot of community outreach programs we partner with other organizations who do important work in this area but today you know when we look look at YouTube we do see a platform with a very diverse set of perspectives and opinions it's partly the strength of the platform and and the reach it provides to voices and then could I get the information about your outreach specifically who you do outreach to that would be very helpful very happy to do that now yield back my time to representative Deutsch thanks I think I'm from from California mr. Burch I just wanted to finish up again appreciate you being here I wanted to follow up on something that the Chairman started our hearing with and that was a question about information collected by Google I think the report that he referred to talked about information collected specifically on Android phones even if those even if those phones aren't on Wi-Fi or or the cell service isn't all I know is that something that happens congressman it's not clear to me how something when there's no connectivity would happen but you know that so we haven't I'm sorry some I'm aware of those concerns be we haven't been able to substantiate those specific findings you're looking into those findings though there's an area there be our you know our goal is to you know we're trying to help users with the information they want today there are many cases users give us feedback part of part of what we're trying to do is they want us to be location aware and you know I I understand but but you're not aware of data being collected while the phone is not connected to either cell service or a Wi-Fi yeah there may be specific instances for example GPS may be working and so you know it depends on the specifics but in general no and so that finally the question is if that information is if if that's possible if you learn that it is happening and I would love you to share that with us if you learn that's happening and the information then when the Consuela customer turns on his his or her cell service if that information is then sent back to your company on their data plan a lot of people obviously have limited data plans when you look at this if you could also look at whether when the information is sent back to the extent it's happening that it might cause some people to go over their limits thereby costing them more on their monthly bill that would be helpful information as well that's a good feedback we will okay Thank You mr. cha Thank You mr. chairman cheering nice gentleman from Georgia mr. Collins for five minutes Thank You mr. chair and they miss being here look there is an understanding I think it's coming across from everyone here and this is saying that I've sort of lived by most of my adult life and I think most people get perception is reality now you can disagree with the perception you can disagree with the reality but it's a certain point in time as you've even heard from many of the folks discussing on both sides of the aisle today there's several perceptions that are going on on what's being stored what's not being stored and how that is or how that date and that privacy issue and also the effects or the outcomes of the searches are made now one of the other issues not just Google itself but also YouTube there's another issue that I will not touch today but probably will do some questions on is the issue of content and the issue of how that is stolen in many cases and how that could be worked on those issues will deal with another setting we've talked about this but I want to go through several questions but it's been discussed a lot about what you collect and what you don't collect so the next few questions will be yes/no question they're not I'm not trying to trick you here it's simply what you click and how do you collect it okay in dealing with Google do you or do not collect identifiers like name age and address yes or no if you're creating an account yeah yes and using an account yes specific search histories when person type something into a search more if you have search history turned on yes device identifiers like IP address or I am he depending on a situation we could be collecting it yes GPS signals Wi-Fi signals Bluetooth beacons it would depend on the specifics so but there may be situations yes GPS yes yes if you whoreson conversations when using google voice products we give an option to turn on our often that if a person didn't know what voice in conversations when using Google Voice products we only record when they initiated with okay Google and then say the terms after contents of emails and in Google Documents we store the data but we don't read or look at your Gmail you have access to them as a company we have access to them yes so you could saying you don't know I'm not asking do you or don't I'm saying you could though there is a possibility we have clear established policies on how he would do that data and their privacy policy speaking of that is changed 28 times including eight times since January 2016 so I think the policies are you know and this is why I'm asking these questions is there any type of or any type or origin of data which Google would refuse to collect that is not already prohibited by laws like Coppa or HIPPA and there are many categories of information today you know via particular about anything to do with health data those are covered under those anything that you would not collect outside of the two that I named which are generally accepted as things you cannot collect there are many things which we don't collect for example we don't collect you could have a product like Google home you won't collect conversations unless you specifically asked us to so you ask a question and so we definitely are very careful and minimize the data we need to provide the service back to our users I'm glad you mentioned itemization we'll get to that in just a second how long do you keep the data that you have captured today we give you the choice of whether you want to store the data or not but if you store the data from the time you turn it on we store it for you okay well let me ask a question here for all this has been discussed I eight identifiers purge histories all these things and for the how many would you say only just that you've interested might require how many people actually understand that they can actually cut this off we remind remain people and every day 20 million people come and make changes in these settings of ysidro but snap control 95% of searches you control this in a very large way I would say the vast majority not the most sophisticated not the ones in a certain age demographic are not as familiar with this essay some who work in the industry or at least around the industry would that not be a fair statement if you could repeat that Congress meant to him I'll get back to it earlier was said that identifiers such as age name and address are treated differently if that is true how are you treating them differently and is the same data collection process still done how is it treated differently than maybe some of these others that we have spoke of that King I think from mr. Dores discussions such as locators and things like that we we offer different controls for that so for example for location we give specific controls for your voice and voice activity we give specific controls we are trying to meet users expectations and so for example some people may want their search history to be available but they don't want YouTube history to be recorded so we give those choices to our users one of the general dynamics of most of the news tech industry and those who collect data is data minimization you brought it up just a few minutes ago the issue that I have in there was in March of this year a security researcher actually downloaded his quote Google takeout this is probably there it was 5.5 gigabyte this is not a just a few names and addresses and where you went why number one does Google need all this information we can answer that in the fact that 85 for saving six percent of your revenue comes from advertising so we know you manipulate the data in some ways however can you explain what you do to minimize this data which is generally an accepted standard practice among those who collect data you know our goal is you know but we are providing for example if you are providing you a service like Gmail which we have done for 15 years that data we need to store it for our users so they expect us to so we are trying hard to match users expectations we don't need you know our data for advertising as I said earlier most of it comes from just the keywords you type and so you know we need minimal data to do advertising we give you options to turn ads personalization off we store most of the data we do today to help give users the experience they want and that's what we're trying to do I'm gonna go back to where I started perception is reality the amount of data being clicked here the how it is being used how you monetize the one AD basically the flow of information that you have and the monetization of that is a concern I think the perception of how it is used and from what side of the aisle is something that this committee I think will take up and continue to process but I think when most people deal with this what I said earlier I'm not sure that in the broad scope of things simply clicking yes especially in a society today in which some of these things and especially that was talking about mobile which we've not dealt into even further is going to open up a much larger situation which is not just simply monetizing data it's actually using information that can be you then used by either law enforcement or others in legal proceedings that can then be used against them that they're not going to understand exactly what is going on with that my time is expiring all for you here thanks gentlemen chair recognize gentleman from Rhode Island mr. Cicilline Thank You mr. pachai for being here in 2006 internet pioneer Vint Cerf testified on behalf of Google that the open Internet was designed so that no central gatekeeper could exert his control to discriminate against rivals consumers or other businesses since then it's become increasingly clear that this virtuous cycle of innovation is fundamentally threatened by the dominance of a few powerful companies Tim berners-lee the inventor of the world wide web made this point clear in an open letter earlier this year where he warned that the open Internet has been compressed under the weight of a few dominant platforms that have the ability to harm competition and control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared online along with 83% of Americans I strongly support an open decentralized internet that is free of powerful gatekeepers with the ability to discriminate against rivals threaten innovation or harm consumers with that in mind I'm deeply concerned by reports of Google's discriminatory conduct in the market for internet search according to findings by the European Commission Google has harmed the competitive process by favoring its own products and services over rivals by de prioritizing or delisting competitors content and so my first question mr. Pachisia as a proponent of internet openness will Google commit to ending the discrimination against rivals and other businesses through Google's products congressman with respect you know I disagree with that characterization we provide users with the best experience they are looking for the most relevant information and that's our true north and that's how we approach our products but include the use of discriminatory practices is that part of your business model definitely not and in the European Commission we are appealing the decision when they looked at shopping as a category they excluded Amazon as a potential entrant in this space so the specifics matter here we are interested in providing users with the best information they are looking for be it from another company and be it from a competitor that that's what we are interested in doing well I strongly believe in structural antitrust enforcement I also plan to work with the Federal Trade Commission to develop a legislation to address this type of discriminatory conduct online will Google commit to working together with Congress on legislative proposals designed to ensure that online firms with significant market power are not able to harm the competitive process to discriminatory conduct you know we're happy to engage constructively on on legislation around any of these areas thank you I like now to turn to the question of China mr. Burch I the operating environment in China has deteriorated with respect to surveillance censorship and the like since Google first made the decision in 2010 to leave in September I sent you a letter along with 15 other colleagues raising serious concerns about reports that Google is planning to re-enter the Chinese market with an app based search engine that would likely have to comply with strict censorship and surveillance requirements imposed by the Chinese government since then a widespread chorus of opposition to such a move has emerged including from lawmakers leading human rights activists and a group of Google's own employees that the environment has deteriorated you're launching an app in that environment would seem to be completely inconsistent with Google's recently launched AI principles which say you will not design or deploy technologies whose and I quote purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights it's hard for me to imagine you could operate in the Chinese market under the current government framework and maintain a commitment to universal values such as freedom of expression and personal privacy so I want to ask very specifically are any employees currently having product meetings on this quite on this Chinese project and when if not when did those end we have undertaken an internal effort but right now there are no plans to launch a search service in China as I said earlier are there any current discussions with any member of the Chinese government on launching this app currently we are not in discussions around launching a search product in China are there any current discussions with members of the Chinese government about this yeah you know this effort currently is an internal effort and you know I'm happy to you know consult I suppose to be transparent to the action we take steps towards launching a product in China and who at Google is leading the Dragonfly effort it's a you know are our efforts around building search you know it's it's it's undertaken by our search teams but these are distributed efforts it's a limited effort internally currently will you mister which I rule out launching a tool for surveillance and censorship in China while you are CEO of Google congressman I commit to engaging one of the things which is important to us as a company we have a stated mission of providing users with information and so we always we think it's in our duty to explore possibilities to give users access to information and you know I have that commitment but you know as I said earlier on this will be very thoughtful and we will engage widely as we make progress well I appreciate that and let me be clear this goes beyond Google and frankly beyond China at a moment of rising authoritarianism around the world when more leaders are using surveillance censorship and repression against their own people or in a moment that we must reassert American moral leadership and I think it's important that because other countries will look at that relationship and mr. chairman with that I'd ask unanimous consent to submit for the record 15 the letter of 15 colleagues and I sent to mr. pachai his response and a letter from more than 50 human and civil rights organizations opposing the launch of a censored Google search engine for the Chinese market and would just note mr. chairman that in the submission of this four unites consent the NGO letter reports that the Chinese government is actively promoting its model of pervasive digital censorship and surveillance around the world many governments look to China's example and a major industry leaders acquiescence to such demands will likely cause many other regimes to follow China's lead provoking a race to the bottom and standards it would also undermine efforts by Google and other companies to resist government surveillance requests in order to protect users privacy and security in bold inning state intelligence and security agencies to demand greater access to user data so the implications objection so order here now recognizes general order mister get them Thank You mr. chairman have you ever launched an investigation into whether political bias is impacting the consumer experience congressman we we do to the extent that our consents we look into them and you know have you have you expressly launched an investigation into political bias of your employees on our employees you said yes you know to the extent you know we always take we take any allegations around code of conduct across every issue seriously and we look into them you said to me yesterday that in as it relates a political bias you haven't launched those investigations because there are so many redundancies and there is so much peer review that that would not be possible that's still your testimony today congressman you say it's it's the way our processes work if you need to make a change in our algorithms there are several steps in the process including launch committees and and user testing and our rater guideline evaluate your company your employees can get together and chat in groups right Google Groups yes they can one of those groups is the civil rights group right we have many employee diso's groups on which they can participate in conversations yes have you ever looked into the conversation into the resist group congressman no is it does that strike is that a surprise to you that there's a resist group I'm not a very but if such a group exists or not if there was a resist group would that be the type of thing that you would want to look into you know we have clear policies around how our products are built and if there's a resist you know that the resist movement is a movement built to resist the agenda of President Trump if there's a resist group within your company where groups of employees not one are getting together within that group to engage in discourse on company time with company infrastructure does that strike you as the type of thing you would want to investigate congressman I'm not aware of any such group now none like that has been brought to my attention and you know happy to follow up you know and understand the consent better yeah mr. Chairman I seek unanimous consent to enter into the record a document from what purports to be Google employee miles Boren's which is opposed to the google group resist without objectives order I'm also reading now from the discussion that occurred over Breitbart and Google ads and and I'm quoting from one of your employees who purportedly posted anyone wants to hold their nose and look through breitbart.com for hate speech why would someone need to hold their nose to do that work congressman today via we have 90,000 employees and they they communicate in forums as a company we have allowed freedom of expression and we don't stand or condone you know comments expressed in these things we're very clear about our policies as to how we build our products and and you know we serve our publishers that way well if if you haven't launched an investigation and any of your employees because it would take a group of employees to engage in improper conduct and if those groups of employees are engaging in discussion on your platform and if one of those platform groups is resist and if on that resist movement site or any other sites in your platform there's discussion of suppressing conservative speech why would that not be something that you would launch an internal investigation in publish the reports sanction those employees that may or may not be engaged in improper conduct so that we can all have greater comfort in the in the user experience congressman first of all I want to assure you we have checks and balances so that employees and we not just on this issue across any issue we protect the sanctity of our systems our product development process and we would do that how can I have confidence that you're protecting the sanctity of your system when you don't even know that your employees are getting together on your own company's infrastructure to talk about political activity in general we always assume our systems are designed we assumed there could be bad intent so we've designed from first principles because you know for security reasons both externally and internally at any given moment we we assume that somebody may be acting in bad faith and and that's how we have designed our systems with all the protections in place we need to do that for our security of our systems and it's a first principles approach so if your assumption is that people can act in bad faith why then have you not launched an investigation into the communications that seem to indicate a desire to suppress conservative political movements and conservative voices well if there are allegations around you know discussions which are specific with the intent of manipulating our products we would conduct an investigation well that's good to hear The Wall Street Journal reported that your workers were discussing tweaking search terms to frame the discussion over the travel ban did you perform an investigation into that allegation we looked into it there was no attempt at you know anything to influence our products there are at times during important news events important for example during events like hurricanes etc we have a set of tools crisis response tools during the travel ban even the Department of Homeland Security was looking to put out information because there was some confusion around the event so there was some discussion around things like that - and I would strongly suggest that one of the crisis response tools that you use is in an investigation into the discourse of your employees on resisting the trump presidency resisting the Trump agenda and then smothering some of the conservative outlets that seem to amplify that content I yield back mr. gentleman yields back the chair now recognizes the gentleman miss Wulla Thank You mr. chairman welcome mr. pachai I represent a congressional district in the San Francisco Bay Area where a number of my constituents work at Google and I was hoping we could dive into some concerns I hear from them but also that I hear from once I just just have concerns about privacy does the United States need a national privacy law congressman I'm of the view given how important privacy is that we are better off with you know more of a single or Archies me but you moving the microphone in front of your mouth so we can hear you better thank you thank you I'm off to opinion that we are better off at with more of overarching you know data production framework which for it uses and I think that would be good to do and you know in Europe just last year they implemented the general data protection regulation known as GD P R and the goals were for consumers to know to understand and consent and would you agree that if there was a framework in the United States to have a national privacy law that would be the you know critical framework to have no understanding consent you know we've had quite a bit of experience now working with GD P R and we have done it for many many months and you know I think there are you know I think it's a well-thought-out crafted piece of legislation I do think there's some value for companies to have consistent global regulations I think it's also important for users as they navigate services globally and so I do see value in aligning where we can mr. Petrie is part of Russia's attack on our democracy in 2016 it used ads on your platform on Facebook's platform on Twitter's platform and money was provided in rubles and from Russia addresses what has Google done to make sure this doesn't happen again and just last week secretary mattis confirmed that Russia continued its attack on our democracy in the most recent midterm elections a congressman has said earlier it's never been missed a lot I mean we did see limited improper activity and you know obviously we learned from that we've been very transparent with our findings leading up over the past couple of years anytime we have found other activity you know which is material we disclose it and we are constantly evolving the practices we do but you know I do say our efforts have been pretty successful so far Google as a whole through both our election cycles but it's an area where it's never enough and you know so you're constantly vigilant and doing more in mr. pichai I don't think anyone disagrees that seen an answer on a results page for certain queries can be useful for example if I type in you know what is 25 times 15 and Google spits out 375 that's useful but today you know if my wife was to search for a pediatrician in Dublin California instead of being matched with the most relevant information from across the web according to Google's algorithms my wife or any mom would see a map that is powered by Google's ecosystem of local reviews and in response to claims that Google has put its own results ahead of its competitors when its PageRank algorithm believes the competitors should be ranked higher google has told certain international enforcers that local search results come from a specialized index which is distinct from its organic web indexed and I was hoping today you could clarify for me is it technically possible for Google to compare local business content it collects against that of content collected by third-party services using a PageRank like quality score you know we employ a wide variety of signals we are interested in providing users we respond to user feedback so as a user you could be on a mobile phone with very limited connectivity you could be a busy parent on your way and you're checking for some information maybe trying to find a doctor because your kid is sick and so we are looking to see how we can get that information to you as quickly as possible that's the use case which drives our product development and and if that information is best available from another company we make it available there are times we are able to provide that information because we have better information and so we are constantly looking and and and and we do that to the best of our ability thank you gentleman yields back at this time the chair recognizes the gentleman miss Johnson Thank You mr. chairman mr. Pichai we want to thank you for appearing today and for taking the time to answer and meet with us individually answer our questions I think you and I both agree it's important for your company and for the people for us to have this public hearing and to get all this information on the record so to speak so as we discussed in my office yesterday my conservative colleagues and I are fierce advocates of limited government and we're also committed guardians of free speech in the free marketplace of ideas we do not want to impose burdensome government regulations on your industry however we do believe we have an affirmative duty to ensure that the engine that processes as much as we've said today 90% of all internet searches is never used to unfairly censor conservative viewpoints or suppress political views your challenge today and in the days ahead is to convince the members of this body that Google and your industry peers will implement your own sufficient safeguards and solutions to this problem so that the government doesn't have to intervene here's a question in previous hearings and discussions google has described the trusted flagger program as a source for recommending content be removed from your platform recently Google released a transparency report on content removal which revealed that out of the seven point seven million automated flagging removals from your platform YouTube around 70% of that content was removed before it had received any views from the public here's the question how does Google ensure that content removed in the automated process is not merely because of philosophical or political differences congressman it's an important question as you said YouTube is committed to being a platform for freedom of expression and you know we we go to great lengths to do that we only handle videos in the areas of clearly defined policies we have we do have automated systems but you know we assess that we later spot check it to make sure the system is working as intended we respond to feedback as content creators you can appeal if you think something was remote erroneously but it's really important to us that we provide a platform for freedom of expression but enforce the rules of the road on areas where we have said and what we are very transparent about the areas and the clear policies with which we do those things you've spoken a lot today about objectivity that's the goal we applaud and appreciate that as you know alphabets Incubator jigsaw introduce perspective it's a tool that uses machine learning to filter online discussions for quote toxicity unquote this to me raises issues of how Google's parent company is using machine learning to filter speech that is viewed as unproductive such as ad hominem attacks or offensive language or the like when creating a tool like perspective what steps is Google taken to protect conservative viewpoints from being considered toxic by subjective or viewers as the program progresses almost when perspective provided by one of our sister organizations jigsaw it's a platform for publishers to use so the publishers get to define what they want acceptable or not and and and then that's what the - you know provides for them but I think your point is valid that maybe we don't want to be in the in the position of just editorializing publisher content and we're just providing a tool for publishers to better Drive the content on their platforms you mentioned the appeals process if a content provider has their material flag how quick does that appeals process work in other words what's the review period I think it varies we prioritize areas which are sensitive for example areas like terrorism is something we prioritize very significantly and higher up in the queue but we are ramping up our resources and our goal is to do it as soon as possible but you know sometimes it can be a matter of hours if it's areas around copyright we have implemented Content ID we have a system by which we can automatically detect and respond right away back to copyright owner so sky is a constant work in progress in the committee's last hearing with Google's missus juniper downs we discussed this I raise the case of the Alliance defending freedom content being removed after being reported by a trusted flagger on YouTube the the flagging organization where the South was the Southern Poverty Law Center which has a kind of an infamous reputation for being I would say radical left organization that opposes conservative viewpoints what criteria does Google use when granting trusted flagger status to third parties such as the SPLC you know today we first want to clarify one thing our clustered flaggers don't remove then they can flag content for us to review and and we review flat content it's mostly used by law enforcement many many nonprofit agencies in in areas important areas like child safety terrorism and so on Southern Poverty Law Center is a trusted flag where people can register last we checked they've never flagged a single video on our platform we have reached out to a wide variety of organizations including conservative organizations we would be happy to take your suggestions to add you know organizations as trusted flaggers I appreciate that we need a little objectivity and the reviewers or not you'll bet Joe messiahs Bar the chair now recognizes gentleman from California mr. Lou Thank You mr. chair this is now the fourth hearing in a series of ridiculous hearings on a free speech of Internet companies a significant portion this hearing was a waste of time because the First Amendment protects private individuals and corporations free speech rights now there are things that Google does unrelated to speech that I disagree with when it comes to search algorithms your prioritization what videos you want to show the First Amendment protects you somebody ask you a series of questions some of them are fairly basic and I apologize but I feel like I have to educate some of my colleagues and how the US Constitution works and feel free to answer yes or no so my first question is we here on the Judiciary Committee or the government and Google is a corporation correct yes or no yes all right the First Amendment limits what government can do in regulating the content of speech it does not limit Google but Google does have to follow corporate laws and other laws and under those laws you and your board of directors have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders correct yes and one of the ways that Google generates a profit is when consumers use your search engine they watch videos some of them click on ads they use your applications isn't that one way you generate profit that's one of the business models we hate and if consumers were not getting the search results they wanted or not not the videos in one of the see they might start moving to your competitors isn't that right every Monday when I run my management meetings yes we worry about the users have a lot of choices so we work hard to earn their trust every week and so let's say you figure out that the number one thing users want to see our dog and cat videos under the US Constitution you have the absolute right to promote dog and cat videos I'm not saying you do that but you do have the right to do that if you want to do isn't that correct congressman you know I'm not the expert on First Amendment but generally I think that's right I thank you so last week when I got noticed gonna have another one of these hearings I did a search on Google I searched for a Congressman Steve Scalise he has a Republican and I hit the news tab and the first four articles that come up or generally pretty positive the first one is from Town Hall a generally conservative publication about his book back in the game second article it's also about his book back in the game third is about him talking about election results fourth is from Fox another positive article about his book back in the game you don't have a group of people Google they're sitting there thinking hey we like Steve Scalise so we're gonna generate positive articles on these search results that's not what's happening right you know I'm very glad to see Congressman Steve Scalise fully record and back but we don't we don't you know deal with individual queries and you know if it any viewpoint and so this fellow we're in your programming code does Congressman Steve Scalise even show up isn't that right yes that's right now I'm gonna do a real-time google search for a very similar term I'm gonna change one word so I'm going to search for consequence Steve King I'm gonna hit the news tab first or alia pops up some ABC news it says Steve King's racist immigration talk prompts calls for congressional censure that's a negative article but you don't have a group of people Google City or thinking and try to modify search results every time Steve King comes up a negative article appears that's not what's happening right we always operate for any query with the same set of principles we are trying to reflect what is currently you know if it is newsworthy what is currently being discussed about that that that phrase thank you so let me just conclude here by stating the obvious if you want positive search results do positive things if you don't want negative search results don't do negative things and do some of my colleagues across Iowa if you getting bad press articles and bad search results don't blame Google or Facebook or Twitter consider blaming yourself I yield back John's time has expired chair now recognizes gentleman from Arizona mr. Biggs Thank You mr. chairman thanks for being here mr. Boucher I I don't disagree with with one point made by the last interrogative it into question let's calm questioner that's easier to say it in the sense that I think you have a First Amendment right to do what you guys want to do so your private company there's very few constraints on the First Amendment although there are lots of constraints ultimately when we start looking at everything from libel to slander to threatening intimidating to the only fire in a crowded theater there's we have constraints on First Amendment speech but you've seemed as we've gone through here today to say that Google doesn't have bias you yourself have said you personally don't have bias or animus and you've also tried to implement policies to prevent bias anonymous as well as that true yeah we work hard to build our products in a neutral way and I'm committed to doing it that way right and in some respects we haven't heard much discussion about the human intersection with the creation or manipulation or editing of algorithms but there is human interaction with the create if you must create the algorithms and you might have some artificial intelligence that might do some additional information as it goes but originally the creativity comes from the humans right that's right well how can we be assured that foreign adversaries will not use your platform against Americans or American national interest you know we we always worry about that that as a trek factor and this is why we make sure you know the best way we do it when we are building our products we don't rely on you know one person or groups of people to be able to do it we follow a set of robust process including tests and validation both from users we get feedback from users and we use raters externally evaluate and we do this for example our search traders in the US are there in all the 50 states of the u.s. we ja graphically distribute them so that we really get the perspectives of everyone around the country well that that doesn't really get to the answering my question of security assurance and so I guess if manipulation of your information systems was not possible or effective we would we would not be seeing so many countries investing in in the capability of manipulation whether it's Russians or Chinese or Iranians or others that are you know attempting to manipulate your system and they may be there may be attempts to use our products and services so for example because we provide advertising products you know somebody and what we saw in the 2016 election was you know limited activity but it's improper to accounts related to Russia you know advertised using our platforms that told 47 hundred bucks I think you said yeah so that's an example of you know the kind of threat we see and you know something we are working hard to mitigate and avoid and so I I guess I would say that looks like you guys have a policy of do no evil right is that fair to say you you it's not our official policy but you know it's it's a statement as it's been communicated by us internally and and other people have brought up the the the work that you may or may not be doing in China and I want a clarification that are you looking to expand in China and cooperate with the Chinese government on a platform release in China the question it's about search right now we have no plans to launch a search in China we have always over the years explode how best we can continue to serve users in China but that's what we're doing are you doing anything with the data share with Chinese government today we don't operate our services which which involve user data like Google search or Gmail in China and so no so you tell me nothing at all then in China we do provide you know for example Android which is a operating system we work with partners around the world and and there are aulia manufacturers around the world including in China so so manufacturers but beyond manufacturers any any other platform use we don't have any special agreements on user data today's government that's right okay do you share the data that you collect on civilians with the United States federal government we comply with valid law enforcement require a request and you know and we do process we comply with valid law enforce what's the extent of that you know we publish a transparency report in which we give insights into the law enforcement requests we of garden and our you know and and our compliance there the last question I haven't real quickly in May 2016 Google banned all ads by payday lenders even though it invested and Lind up which is effectively a payday lender and it banned ads by by competitors is that a normal practice congressman we undertook ad policies in that particular area because we saw evidence of misuse and we had gotten a lot of feedback and that's what we reacted to did you did you ban your own Lind up I don't think Google is involved I think one of our sister companies is a you know has has an investment in Linda yeah I think that's my understanding and I can follow up I'm not aware of the specifics they're happy to follow Thank You Jennifer Marilyn mr. raskins recognized Thank You mr. chair welcome and thank you for your testimony today do you know what frazzled drip is I'm not aware of the specifics about it I heard some reference about it from my team over the past 24 hours um I just learned about in The Washington Post this morning this article with this headline a platform for free speech that extremists routinely exploit and in it the article explains that the recommendation engine for YouTube which which is owned by Google correct yes the recommendation engine for YouTube recently suggested videos claiming that politicians celebrities and other lead figures were sexually abusing were consuming the remains of children often in satanic rituals according to watchdog group algo transparency the claims echo and often cite the discredited Pizza Gate conspiracy which two years ago led to a man firing shots into a Northwest Washington DC pizzeria in search of children he believed were being held as sex slaves by Democratic Party leaders one recent variation on the theory which began spreading on YouTube this spring claimed the Democrat Hillary Clinton or longtime aide Huma Abedin had sexually assaulted a girl and drank her blood a conspiracy theory its proponents dubbed a frazzle drip now the article goes on to describe how this frazzled drip conspiracy is all over YouTube and some of the reproductive ages of Clinton and Abba Dean committing crimes and speak of invoking the death penalty in one video which has been viewed seventy-seven thousand times and remains online today has a voiceover that says will these children become the dessert the conclusion of the meal so and this is just one example that they use of extreme right and paranoid conspiracy groups using YouTube as a place to trade their videos and to promote propaganda what is your company policy on that and are you trying to deal with it you know we are we are constantly undertaking effort to deal with misinformation but you know we have clearly stated policies and we have made lots of progress and many of the areas where you over the past year so for example in areas like terrorism child safety and so on we are looking looking to do more you know this was a recent thing but I'm committed to following up on it and and making sure we are evaluating these against our policies but yes an area we acknowledged there's more work to be done and you know and we'll definitely continue doing that one of the videos discussed included images of a body on a table before restrained children and of Hillary Clinton with a bloodied mouth and fangs claiming that she and Aberdeen drank the blood of their victim that was removed but then another consisting of an exact copy of the video remained online they're apparently remains online so I mean is your basic position that this is something you want to try to do something about but basically there's just an avalanche of such material there's really nothing that can be done and it should be buyer beware or consumer beware when you go on YouTube you know we do grapple with difficulty issues maybe we have to look at it on a video by video basis and we have clearly stated policy so we would need to evaluate whether the video the specific video yeah while it's any of our policies and we do strive to do it for the volume of content we do get and you know around 400 hours of video every minute but it's our responsibility I think to make sure you know YouTube is a platform for freedom of expression but it's responsible and contributes positively to society some of my colleagues are upset about negative references to Donald Trump not Hillary Clinton or not Barack Obama and obviously you know one potential strategy today is to try to heckle you into somehow playing favorites with Donald Trump and Republicans I think that that would be a silly and ridiculous take away from this on the other hand there is material which is a true public danger you know you you've got a right to have whatever politics you have I mean we could we could subpoena Fox News and bring them in here and beat them up about how 90% of the references on Fox News to Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton are negative but they've got that right under the First Amendment you right under first amendment to have whatever political views you've got but I think the point at which it becomes a matter of serious public interest is when your communications vehicle is being used to promote propaganda that leads to violent events like the guy showing up within the pizza gate conspiracy case and so I guess my question is are you taking that threat seriously I mean is time is expired but you can ask the question q we have very clear policies against hate speech things which could incite harm or hatred or violence and you know that's an area where we are clearly taking a lot of action but I want to acknowledge that a small work more work to be done and you know with our growth comes more responsibility and we are committed to doing better as we invest more in this area Thank You mr. chairman chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Georgia mishandle Thank You mr. chairman thank you very much for being here mr. pitch I four years of Federal Trade Commission on a bipartisan basis and has affirmed that precise geolocation information is considered highly highly sensitive and that consumers must opt in to that do you agree with that yes I agree with that do you think there's other information privacy information of consumers that should also be required to have opt in versus opt out in general I think a framework for privacy in which users have a sense of transparency control and choice and have clear understanding of the trade-offs they need to make I think it's very good for consumers and we would support that and speaking of privacy and transparency I'm trying to understand the difference between I'm a paying customer for the Google Suites versus the free Gmail so when it comes to data collection are the criteria and the rules the same if you're on Google Suites versus Gmail Gmail Google suite is a broader suite of products than Gmail alone you know we have very specific policy policies around Gmail in general we don't as a company we don't read your Gmail unless we have expressed consent from you for sample to investigate security or abuse related to an account on Jay suite we provide G suite across many instances we have clear policies against that too we don't use it but what I'm asking is are the policies different we don't distinguish between so for example today we provide G suite for free to many educational institutions we don't use that data for from within G suite for our advertising you collect it well we store you know G suite involves user documents speed documents or Gmail so we store it for that for the user so that they can access it and no one in your company has access to it people but they do have access you have policies that they cannot access it unless they have specific consent from the user for a specific situation well will be one of those reasons for example you may want to investigate fraudulent activity related to your account and you know we may ask for your permission to do do that there may be a valid law enforcement requirement which we have to comply with all right I'm gonna go back to a Google takeout which my colleague from Georgia asked about earlier I would say that the average person probably has never heard of Google takeout until recently so when did it become available we we we started this effort you know I'm aware of it as early as over 10 years ago and we started building for many of our products we started an office in Chicago with the express goal of providing users with this takeout capabilities I think we were quite unique and starting to work on that as a company but there's more effort we plan to do there who has access to it this is for users so for example if you decide to you know stop your Gmail account and you go with another email provider being able to take your Gmail data with you and that's what it's designed for takeout is for users here and but no one from within Google or any other place can come in to Google takeout and get your information no it's it's expressly designed for consumers to take their data with them and understand what it's designed for I'm asking who practically can get access to it you know we have strict limitations on access to sensitive so it s'more than Joseph if I were going to Google takeout for care and handle I'm not the only person who has access to my Google takeout you are the only person who can take out your data but I'm just saying you asked about internal systems we have clear policies employees can go looking at user data unless there is a there are a narrow set of circumstances which may involve either consent from the user or legal situations etc all right is it free is take so when a person takes their data out or they want to go through and clean up privacy and they delete is it really deleted or is it just hidden if depending on the service if you're terminating your account and you you delete the data it will take some time and we communicate that to propagate through our systems and and get removed but we follow through on that but it's deleted it's not just hidden from sighs deleted ok one last question you said that your company embarked on an initiative to register people to vote how did you do that and who did you target and in what States all we you know so for example during registration windows we you know we be highlight we give people information about where to register we do these things representatively across for all our users across the US and all indications are that the participation is uniformly high across our user base so the you know we do this with the express goal of how did you do it did you send out links did you send out voter registration forms to people each time inspire but you can ask the question or example on on the Google home page we may say check where your polling places and as a user you can click on it and we give you the location of your closest polling locations and the opening times available to you that's maybe following up on that Thank You mr. chairman are you Jaron Eric is the gentlelady from Washington State mr. job Thank You mr. chairman and thank you mr. pitch I for coming to testify before us I for one am thrilled that you as a company encourage people to vote I think we should all do that I'd love to see Election Day as a holiday I've been deeply concerned for some time about employers and dating forced arbitration rather than allowing for people to pursue justice and forcing people into arbitration when they've already experienced a violation of their basic rights I think is a deep injustice and it subjects people who have already been victimized to further victimization and we've seen research that shows that it discourages people from coming forward to report abuses to begin with there are very successful companies in your field including companies like Salesforce that have thrived while forgoing forced arbitration contracts and clauses and I think that we can all agree that the argument that eliminating forced arbitration threatens innovation should be dismissed out of hand eliminating forced arbitration has been a shared priority by my colleagues on this committee as evidenced by the fact that our ranking member Jerry Nadler as well as Hank Johnson David Cicilline and I have all introduced legislation to end the practice and I was very heartened to see that Google ended forced arbitration but only in the context of sexual harassment and so I hope you agree with me that upholding people's fundamental right to safety in the workplace and freedom from discrimination whether it's based on gender or sexual orientation or race or religion or any other metric really benefits all of us and so I wanted to point out that it's particularly critical for companies like Google to take that moral leadership in this space since there are limitations for affected people to pursue system-wide change through tools like class-action lawsuits and I recognize that this is not exclusive to Google and that it extends to many many other employers but since you're here before the committee today which has jurisdiction over this issue I want to ask you if you will voluntarily commit to expanding the policy of ending forced arbitration for any violation of a person's rights not just around sexual harassment but really for all of your employers and your contractors congresswoman thanks for the question it's an important area one thing if I could clarify today our arbitration agreements don't require any confidentiality provisions that's how we have done it but but as you as you mentioned for sexual harassment we agreed that it should upto their employees and we gave them a choice we are definitely looking into this further it's an area where I've gotten feedback personally from our employees so we are definitely reviewing what we could do and you know I'm looking forward to consulting and and happy to think about more more changes here well we'd love to work with you on that I think that this really for people who are listening to this hearing that may not understand this basically when you sign a contract as we saw with sexual harassment you some some employees don't even know what they're signing away but they're signing away their ability to actually pursue claims in the justice system by going to forced arbitration and so I think that this is very very important I think your point about confidentiality is important but that's not the issue here that is about transparency but it's not about the basic right of somebody to seek access to due process and to justice in the courts so what stage are you at in advancing the issue of ending forced arbitration both on the sexual harassment side but also in terms of the process for looking at it more broadly how do we how do we have a timeline how do we engage with you to make sure that you endorse our legislation as we move forward in the next Congress we've already you know we've we've already enacted the changes for forced arbitration for giving arbitration as an option for employees for sexual harassment we are definitely reviewing what more we could do in this area I'm definitely happy to have my office follow up as they're thinking about it to get get your thoughts on it and we are definitely committed to looking into this more and making changes thank you the other issue I wanted to just raise in my last minute is moderating hate speech and this has come up in a number of different ways and we appreciate the work that you have done particularly with YouTube I know we had Alex Jones in the room earlier but I think you know promoting conspiracy theories that are patently false and result in real harm is a problem do you agree with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights assessment that social media played a role for example in perpetuate perpetuating genocide against the Rho hinga and what is Google's responsibility to moderate hate speech on on your platforms we feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to moderate hate speech you know define we've defined hate speech clearly as inciting violence or hatred towards groups of people it's absolutely something which I think we need to take a very strict line on and and we have stated our policies clearly and we are working hard to make our enforcement better and and we have gotten a lot better and but it's not enough and so we are committed to doing more here well we really look forward to working with you on that and before I yield back mr. chairman let me just take a point of personal privilege to say I was born in the same state as you in India and I'm excited to see you leading a company and continuing to show that immigrants to this country contribute great value in spite of some of the rhetoric we hear thank you mister pitchaiah yield back gentlemen's lady gentlelady's time has expired now chair recognizes the gentleman mr. office Thank You mr. chairman Pichai thank you for being here - appreciated the reference to Pittsburgh in your opening cesta money great to have you in a part of our community there your company really should be held out as a success story of America's free enterprise system Google has very powerful products and services there is a saying that goes with with great power comes great responsibility I think he realized that I want to talk a little bit about these allegations of bias that have been out there and you know I've seen the media reports about a few Google engineers lamenting the 2016 election results then they discussed potentially manipulating search results that would favor some political viewpoints in the future on a hypothetical level those Google engineers believed that they had the power to influence an election do you think Google's products and services are powerful enough that they can sway public opinion to tilt enact an election if the company wanted to are your products that powerful congressman today ABC uses get information from a wide variety of sources and while Google is a big player in search search is just one of the ways in which people get information they get it from social networking sites use think that your products are that powerful that's not the way I think about it and we're building building the products you know we constantly worry about the areas where we are not doing well and we're looking to do better we definitely see a lot of innovation not just from within the US but globally around the world and and we do realize we are a large company and with that comes scrutiny and we think it's important to engage on that you've testified about Google and its algorithms working on a non-party in a nine nonpartisan way and that you're confident that Google does not approach work with any political bias Zoe Lofgren highlighted the vote in in Santa Clara County does Google do anything to ensure ideological diversity among its employees and decision makers congressman we've you know I've communicated clearly to the company that you know we need to welcome viewpoints from across all sides as a company we are you're right we are definitely based in Northern California and clearly you know there is a leaning there but last year was the first year we grew faster outside of California then within California we also have employees globally and I do see a wide variety of opinions mr. Johnson asked a question about the trusted flagger program you said for us to review who's the US who's doing the who's doing that review we review things both with a combination of our ottoman automated systems as well as manual reviewers these are people who are part of and how many people is that how many is that a committee is it you know in 20 come it it to scale up our manual reviewers to over 10,000 people and we're well underway to do that and so there's a thousands of people working 24/7 globally across looking at content based on our policies Google has described its ethic with these pithy great statements don't be evil do the right thing I'd like to discuss these ideals in relation to reports at Google that we've been talking about with China the strict authoritarianism the Chinese government rules its people has caused turn around the globe for generations I vividly recall the early days of June 1989 and Tiananmen Square now I read reports recent reports about crackdowns on Muslims Christians on Falun Gong Mass incarcerations and human rights abuses against people of faith in China should be a major concern for everyone around the world including your company did Google design a prototype for a search engine that could be used in China to censor content congressman we have undertaken an internal effort a date did you create a prototype that there was a report and the intercept that says a prototype for the censored search engine was designed what search could look like if it if it were to be launched in a country like China and that's what we explode and how many months was their project ongoing we've had the project underway for a while and there have been other projects which we've undertaken for a while and we've never launched them - so it could be a constant be exploring how many how many people the estimates you know Chapman sorry the number of Engineers and the project have varied over time again at one point we've had over 100 people working on it it's my understanding I just want to echo what my colleague Miss Jo Powell had had said you know yeah I'm glad you're here to committee but I'm glad you're here in our country um you are the success story and I can just think of you sitting as a teenager in India thinking that this part was probably never even on your your radar but you came to this country because this country had that promise out there and I want to thank you for being here today and encourage you to continue collaborating with this Khmer thank you time has expired the chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Florida mr. Demming thank you so much mr. chairman and mr. Boucher I'm here thank you so much for being here and enduring all that we have heard and seen today as you know Google certainly has significant influence over the dissemination of information to the American people you have the ability to mold and shape how we think the decisions we make what we buy but let me just remind you and others that America with all of his greatness has enough problems and we have to make sure that the gift of Google is used the service that you provide is a responsible one in your own statement you said that the American people have the ability to use technology to improve their lives so that tells me Google helps to solve problems not create problems my concern specifically centers around the protection of the consumers because Google certainly would not be anything without the consumer so the protection of the data their information the the level of service that you provide and I know we've talked a lot today about data collection and how it's used and if the settings are in place then it's not collected so let me just understand really starting with the Chairman's questions which I thought was a good opening for us if a consumer tells you not to collect their data then you do not collect the data is that correct that's that's right okay and how does Google or just Google allow advertisers to target ads based on sensitive factors like race ethnicity religious affiliation currently if we don't have those the ones you mentioned as factors in our advertising product okay and what is your policy regarding predatory advertisements you know we have strict policies against and you know we respond to concerns there we've undertaken significant changes to the action we find predatory darkus is on our platform so it's nearly every year committed to doing better and since we do represent everybody poor communities as well as affluent communities how do you make sure that the information that is received in at-risk communities protects the consumer if you will how they treated the same in terms of affluent versus poor communities how do you make sure that they are we do engage with community organizations we do you know our teams two wide outreach and to the extent there are specific concerns which you know there is an abuse of our product or platform which affects you know communities desperately we do follow up and engage and take action and how do you do that again please so for example you know if there's a specific category if a product where you know we get clear feedback the baby of implemented the product has a disparate effect on some minority communities we do engage and we understand and you know make changes in our products or policies so you get feedback so do you initiate or do any checking or is does that information have to come back to you or you proactive in terms of looking for those type of vulnerabilities we do boat and you know but I do think there's more we can do in being proactive and it's something I'm happy to follow up and understand better but you know it's an area we are committed to doing well you talked quite a bit about working more with law enforcement I believe you've said that maybe four or five times I'd like to hear more about some of the things that you do with law enforcement to protect the consumers as well and protect our electoral process and other things that we should care about we we do this across a wide variety of areas so for example and there were concerns expressed about election interference it's an area where we look to law enforcement for guidance areas like child safety is an area where we actively collaborate with law enforcement agency so fraud malware and you know depending on the area we engage and we support them through efforts they are trying to do though pre-crisis is a good example of an area where we are doing a lot of work with law enforcement what do you think is the main area where Google could improve to better help the consumer I always gotta protect the consumer I always think you know privacy is an area where we think there's sacrosanct and we have done a lot for users over the years but it's an area where expectations are constantly evolving and we are as a company needing to evolve and adapt to it and so it's an area we are committed to doing better but it's an a I want to acknowledge that there's more to do and it's never done and and something we are committed to doing better again thank you and mr. chairman I yield back generally the yields back the chair now recognizes the gentleman from Texas mr. Gohmert for five minutes mr. pajetta appreciate your being here and I think most all of us agree on both sides we applaud great work for example Steven Spielberg despite politics he's provided my family a lot of enjoyment entertainment you and your colleagues at Google have created an extraordinary vehicle for searching out things it's fantastic and as mr. Lew a friend across the aisle was pointing out you know you've got government it's not supposed to interfere in people's civil rights and then you've got a company or corporation like Google my problem is when the government gives its immunity from lawsuits over to a private corporation that's the head of that corporation doesn't even realize that there is political bias run a monk in his company and that's the problem I don't want to see you over regulate I don't want to see you regulated I want to see others come up with brilliant ways as you mr. breem and others did to create something that makes life easier but a good example you have a trusted flagger you'd indicated called the Southern Poverty Law Center the Southern Poverty Law Center really has stirred up more startup more hate than about any other group I know they stirred up one guy to the point that he went to the Family Research Council and I know those people and they're Christians and they believe and I believe that Christianity is really more based on love than about any other religion in history God so loved the world he sent his son his son so loved the world he gave His life and yet they start up hate against the Family Research Center and a guy goes in shooting you have let us see June 18th of this year Southern Poverty Law Center announced it had reached a settlement with Najib Nawaz and his organization kill him were falsely labeling them as anti-muslim hate group they were wrong now you consider them a trusted flagger yet they keep creating problems for people that are not haters and in fact they had to excuse me they had to pay out three point three seven five million my problem is when you put your moniker on them a trusted flagger why aren't you paying three point three seven five to mr. namazi tina was that's my problem you trust people that have stirred up a lot of hate and another good example and you don't you're so surrounded by liberality that hates conservatism hates people that really love our Constitution and the freedoms it's afforded people like you that you don't even recognize it this it's like a blind man not even knowing what light looks like because you're surrounded by darkness but if you looked let's see a good example after President Trump won your co-founder mr. Brent said quote most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad now a lot of us seen the video we saw how upset the top people at Google were and for you to come in here and say there is no political bias in Google tells us you either are being dishonest I don't want to think that or you don't have a clue how politically biased Google is now another example is Wikipedia we do a search and what comes up right there is the knowledge panel on the right and we hopefully will have a screenshot of that we get Wikipedia my chief of staff went on she told me every night for two weeks and put proper honest information in with proper annotations and Wikipedia's liberal editors around the world would knock it out every day and instead put up a bunch of garbage like Mark Levine has now been facing yet to you they get a trusted spot and when Wikipedia slanders or liable someone and you're the one that has trusted them above any other entity you ought to be liable you'll be liable and SPLC is liable you ought to be liable when Wikipedia demeans and uses their political bias and I hope and encourage you to look around and notice your runoff conservatives you embrace liberals and it's time Google was actually not immune so that people can hold you accountable and get a little better objectivity I see my time's running out I give back thank you I appreciate your testimony here today and I number these questions follow to me even though I may be repeating some of this but I'm still not clear on how many staff and who it is that establishes the parameters by which the algorithms are written can you tell me about how many staff where that is and and how that works congressman today it's it's our search team which which works on the core core of our search teams and it's you know well over a thousand people I can you know I'm happy to elaborate more but it's close enough conceptually and when you hire them are there other people who aren't coming in from the outside are they brought up from internally what's the typical path to this roughly thousand person search team it's a combination of both but senior-most engineers and our search team typically tend to have been in the company for a very long time and so most of the time you will know them from having worked with them do you then you go into their social media to try to determine what they might be doing on social media normally we don't you know as a company we have allowed people to express themselves but we we make it clear that how we build our products is done with great care and thought focused on giving users the information they are looking for but these are this team of roughly a thousand they're the people that write the parameters by which those who write the algorithms write the algorithms that's roughly correct yeah uh-huh and so there isn't really any and any look at what their private lives are even over there are their public social media is not examined by the company and does anyone outside of Google know who these thousand people are we don't we don't examine their personal activities and you know there are some senior people are you don't do participate in conferences and meetings outside and they're known to the outside community and we're watching people whose social Media has knocked them out of some pretty high positions in life almost every week there's one or more whose social media this week a couple of them that I can think of just in the last 24 or 48 hours but I'm gonna make this point and I believe I've made it with a number of the of the Internet companies that have been sitting here at this table in the past what we remember situation here is that there's a very strong conviction on this side of the aisle that the algorithms are written with a with a bias against conservatives the people on the other side don't agree with that because of course it benefits them and but what we don't know are who are these thousand people and we don't know what their social media looks like but we do know that the people that come from that County were about 80 percent supporters of Hillary Clinton if I listen to the gentlelady from California correctly and so that would be a built-in bias if I know people from California and know their politics from California and I think I do so we've got at least theoretically ability and bias that's here it's not being examined and not examining the social media how would you expect that you could get to an objective result which you said that you know we build our products in a neutral way but that doesn't mean that your product comes out neutral so how would you expect to get to unbiased result with a built in formula that I've described that I don't think you object to or disagree with congressman it's an important question but the way we rank our results is essentially based on user feedback and that's what drives the iterative loop in our you know in what we put in so I do understand how its prioritized that way and I watch what's going on but I made this point that if we don't know who the thousand are and we can't look at their social media and we can't see the algorithms to understand their results of the work they're doing behind closed doors and yet the public believes that it's an open forum where there is an a balanced exchange of open access for information of course it's not and so I have said we either need to know who they are and look at their social media and if that doesn't solve this problem next step then is publish the algorithms if that doesn't happen then the next step on the line section 230 the amendments of section 230 and the step on the line beyond that is a Teddy Roosevelt step now I'm going from it mr. Gohmert I don't want to regulate anything but neither do I want to see a society that's so polarized and so divided and so loaded that the will of the American people can't be expressed in the ballot box that looks like either where we are or the direction we're going and I would just finish it with this I have a seven-year-old granddaughter who picked up her phone before the election and she's playing a little game kind of game a kid would play and up on their pops a picture of her grandfather and I'm not gonna say into their record what the kind of language was used around that picture of her grandfather but I'd ask you how does that show up on a seven-year-olds iPhone who's playing a kids game congressman iPhone is made by a different company and so you know I mean it might have been an Android I was just it was a hand-me-down of some kind you know I I guess I'm happy to follow up and understand the specifics it there may be an application which was being used which had a notification but I'm happy to understand it better and clarify it for you okay thank you for your testimony and yield back the balance of my time Sherman what purpose the gentleman from Texas seek recognition to place three questions on the record mr. chairman we've already indicated we'll take all questions submitted in writing and ask him to answer them and I'd appreciate it if I can hear these three all right without objection I thank you for the courtesy of the gentlelady from Alabama I think it's her time next there have been several points made and obviously algorithm has been mentioned over and over again three questions one the explaining how algorithm may play into someone's impression that conservative is over liberal I think you're very clear on that that it's not the case in addition your clarification on China and engaging in any activities to censor those individuals and number three the algorithms again about your products may be a proprietary may be a priority over others and any explanation as to how that is in fact if you represent it to be not true or how that might be perceived that that happens your products Google products over others and how algorithms may play a part into that and the gentlewoman will submit those in writing to us so we can submit thank you mister and I thank the gentleman and I thank you for yielding thank you very much thank you chair recognizes the gentleman from Florida mr. Rutherford for five minutes Thank You mr. chairman mr. bhishan I thank you very much for your testimony today I want to go back to the privacy policy and talk about some of those issues because I think it's very important for the American public you mentioned the transparency in your policy but when you know I know your policy is 20 pages long changes multiple times a year I have to ask a couple questions about the policy because I quite frankly don't understand all of it and that is the the the policy states that Google's data collection applies when quote you use Google service and so most consumers would think that means Google search or Google Maps my question is does the policy apply when a consumer contacts a double-click cookie are you then are they then under that policy or like today our product there is called Google Ad manager and in general when users interact with our services we you know we need a consent and by law we need to apply our privacy policy so that we can offer them the full protections we can and and and fulfill our obligations and so as part of that I think if you're interacting with our ads so this is video of you know we do get your content for your privacy policy so that's written in the policy okay and then and then secondly if a consumer does not have a Google account but they land on a webpage that has Google Ad where again is that consumer using a Google service under the privacy policy my understanding would be yes if they are interacting if they you know they may be both subject to the privacy policy of the publisher or the application they're using as well as to add platforms that work work on that product ok and then third and finally your privacy policy says you collect voice and audio information when you use audio features however does this mean Google assistant is recording our voices in conversations how about when just just using Google Voice or is that actually being recorded today if you invoke Google Voice by either using the microphone or you say ok Google and issue a command we treat it like a search query and and and record that activity but we have a we have a separate setting which in which as a user you can choose whether you want these stored or or not and so we give users a choice and option you know when it gets a transparency I think when you realize you have these active you know where I'm clicking and giving that information and agreeing to it I think people understand that information is is going out and and they're giving that permission that's these passive collection points you know like like Android and Chrome where they're picking up that information and and the user I'm not sure the user actually knows that and and so you know one of my questions is we're agreeing to a privacy policy but we don't really know what information were we're giving up because it there are other groups that you are contracting with Android and and Chrome we're collecting passive information how do you address that and and how do you make that transparent for the consumer are spend media is privacy policy aloneness you know is not enough this is why we prompt and give privacy checkups so let me stop you there and ask you them because they you know is it possible for Google to send me a printout of all the information that they have collected on me within the last month and where I've been what what where I've clicked what there's all that information you have all that information that could be provided to me right we do make it available to you very easily you know we won't be a concern about the security of the data so we don't you know casually get it out but all right so so I would ask if if we run out of time but instead of instead of me as a consumer or anyone as a consumer giving you the the privacy right up front well why don't you why don't you be more honest with me tell me exactly what information is being collected what information you want shir and then allow me to decide how much of that information I would like to share as a consumer congressman I agree with it's any money in fact what you precisely do is actually be of a transparent and like they make it very easy you go to your account settings we clearly tell the categories and you can click and see the information we have you can turn it on or off but we want to do better and yeah but there are areas where information is being collected even if I have I have the particular sites turned off there's still information being collected through some of these other passive systems that you that you've contracted with correct we we are pretty explicit about data which we collect and we give productions for you to turn them on or off and even when you use a product like Chrome or Gmail you know or Google home you're very clear about the data we collect and be reflected back to the user the data we have on them and we try to be transparent I can just say my times out but I would tell you this I would much rather be giving permission after I know what information I'm giving it so thank you very much again and I appreciate time I yield back mr. chairman sure thanks gemin recognizes the gentlewoman from Alabama is Roby for five minutes Thank You mr. chairman thank you I'm just gonna build upon what my colleague was just talking about he's a specific example in June of 2016 Google changed its privacy policy to allow for combining the double-click cookie information with quote personal identifiable information before this change the cookies that track people across the web we're not melded with other consumer information Google got from searches or Android phone use and it's my understanding that when Google purchased double-click representations were made that Google would keep the data separate the point here is you've heard from many people concerns today about the consumer and what the consumer knows and I understand there's a personal responsibility as a consumer to do my part to try to understand the but it's also very complicated stuff and so I want to point to something positive that Google is doing in March you had the online safety Roadshow that came through Alabama 2nd congressional district to a middle school Girard middle school in Dothan you're you're being a corporate citizen by trying to teach our young people how to be smart and safe on the Internet and as a mom of a 13-year old girl I appreciate that very much I think that is truly truly a good example of what it means to be a corporate citizen that these young people can have the world in their hands in recognizing that all the positive things that can come from it there's some dangers as well I would just say I think what we would all benefit from is is understanding as a corporate citizen what are you doing to educate the consumer about the privacy policy you've heard many of my colleagues point to the fact that you have this twenty page privacy policy but it changes multiple times during the year or there's representations that are made in 2016 about double-click that change and so most of us don't have a way to understand this in a way to know that the data that's being collected on is exactly how it's being used so I pod you for the work that you're doing to educate our young people but I would just ask if you could provide us you said you use the words evolve and adapt when it comes to the policy but what are you doing specifically to help educate your consumers on how they can be aware of when they click accept' on the privacy policy that they have a better understanding of how their data is going to be used congressman it's a good question and for example we are sending email reminders for certain types of data that's being collected and asking you to go review your settings and that's an example of the kind of evolution we are doing and we are implementing we are looking at combining settings where we can so that it's easier for users so we want to minimize the number of controls but we want to match it with users have complex expectations too for example they want some of their devices to be private but they are okay with some of their other devices being able to be used where location is aware etcetera so we are trying to match users expectations users do tell us and they search for weather or restaurants they want restaurants near their location and not somewhere else and and and as you can imagine if someone from Alabama is searching they want information relevant to them so that's what we are trying to meet but I agree with you that we need to simply simplify this even more and there's more work to do and it's a constant effort we are undertaking as I look into 2019 we'll be doing more changes to make things work better and I'll take this feedback to account well in just one example Amman legislative assistant was showing me in the privacy policy where it's redlined to show that with the change ways but it's not pointed out to that I'm aware of it's not pointed out to the consumer when the policy is updated for whatever reason what the exact change is you have to go search for it and find it yourself and so if I've got that correct you correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is you would have to scroll through the entire privacy policy policy to see where the changes were made is that correct I'm happy to follow up on that I you know I do think there are times we have pointed out to the updates in a blog post or something and we make it clear what the changes are but happy to follow up and get the specific I think the more you could streamline to the consumer how their personal information will be used is being used without the consumer having I mean again there's a personal responsibility there as well but I just think you're doing some good things in terms of educating folks about particularly with the online safety Roadshow I think that you could take some of the work you're doing there and hearing our concerns here today look for ways that you could better educate the consumer moving forward thank you I yield back thank you very much mr. Chang a couple of quick follow-ups here that I don't think anybody asked who makes the judgment calls regarding content moderation at Google chairman it depends on the area so for example if it's YouTube we have you know very clear teams which are responsible for YouTube content policies and they identified is it possible for a customer to write to them and say hey here's here's a concern I have become clear channels for content creators to you know to raise concerns back and we have clear avenues and and we also have had people who are responsible for these platforms including content moderation appear here you know and and and and I think they've consulted widely here here - I have a question about preloaded apps do you have agreements with the companies that I mean Amazon might have an app that they put on your platform do you have a data sharing agreement with them do they get the information and you get the information that's generated by their app as well how does that work we don't have any special agreements with respect to user data as part of pre-loading any application so if another somebody puts that app on your platform they do it with your permissions that correct not necessarily you know so for example our a device manufacturer can preload applications on on Android and you know it's up to them and the app developer to do so right if they operate on your operating system do you get the information as well as the app owner of information about what's happening within that application right unless there may be specific cases where the user has given as diagnostic information so the answer would depend on the context but in general no I mean the relationship is between the user and the app developer you get an app that gathers information on a specific thing that's not also coming to Google as well as to the developer of the app you know general sense No and then finally and this you can you can write to us a written answer because it's a very lengthy answer I believe but I'm interested in knowing I know you've had a lot of difficulties in Europe of late and I'm interested in knowing how your policy in Europe differs from your policy of the United States I'm happy to have it fault me I think it's a pretty extensive topic I'm happy to have follow-up on that that area back to back to your office ok yes we would appreciate that we'll give you some written questions that other members have provided we'll have some more of our own and we would ask that you respond to those promptly definitely well thank you well you've gone for about three and a half hours and it's about what we predicted isn't it yesterday when we talked so we thank you very much for your participation today this concludes today's hearing and without objection all members will have five legislative days to submit written question for the witness or additional materials for the record and with that this hearing is adjourned

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Id: uM5IHHCEb3k

Length: 216min 21sec (12981 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018