Sundar Pichai Testifies Before Congress: A Media Embarrassment

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before Congress yesterday, and yet again our media completely fumbled an opportunity to discuss challenging concepts affecting citizens. The stated reason for the hearing was to talk about Google's data collection policies, and the committee got off to a pretty decent start publicizing lawmakers' concerns about the influence of big data over the population in the political process. 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. 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 a presidential election. The public's increasing use of these platforms has generated many positive benefits for society, but 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. Just the opening comments were a much more interesting debate than what most media outlets actually reported on. Federal Communications Commissioners 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 and expand its scope to social media companies. I doubt we will see any interest in doing so. Instead of any meaningful conversation surrounding Google business practices, the media treated us to a handful of tasty, inane ramblings of the woefully tech illiterate. That really wasn't emblematic of the bulk of this hearing. I have a seven-year-old granddaughter who picked up her phone before the election, and she's playing a little game, the kind of game a kid would play, and up on there pops a picture of her grandfather. And I'm not going to say into the record what 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-old's iPhone who's playing a kid's game? Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company, and so, you know, I mean... It might have been an Android. It was a hand-me-down of some kind. Sundar Pichai answered questions for three hours. You can't get a sense of that if we only focus on one congressman rambling about iPhone apps. If you're just an average Joe trying to make it through your day, it's fine if you're not up to date on the latest trends. It's really not okay if you are, in part, responsible for crafting the laws which govern this space. There were several spirited exchanges which attempted to dig deeper into actual Google policy. Yesterday, Google disclosed that private profile data of over 52 million users may have been exposed. I understand that you're phasing out the Google Plus 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? My settings now 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, and my YouTube search history is paused. That said, it doesn't mean that you're not collecting data on me, does it? We are playing second fiddle to the Europeans. They protect the privacy of their folks more than we do. I think the United States Congress needs to move in a direction 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. We all know that heads of companies will rarely stray far from their PR messaging. We're not likely to get any staggering revelations. There were a lot of, I'll check back on that for you kinds of answers. For any service we provide our users, we go to great lengths to protect their privacy, and we give them transparency, choice, and control. Android is a powerful platform and provides smartphones for over 2 billion people. As part of that, it depends on the applications users choose to use. If you're using a fitness application, which is detecting 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 it depends on the use cases. However, it is a chance to see if our lawmakers are at least aware of the issues their constituents face. Are they on the pulse? Google has long faced criticism for manipulating search results to censor conservatives. Conservative individuals and organizations have had their pro-Trump content tagged as hate speech or had their content reduced in search results. Well, we shouldn't be surprised by some political grandstanding. 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. See, that was a great list of topics that apparently we weren't able to completely discuss. And again, I'm not even expecting congressmen to be experts, but I do expect them to be well briefed and well prepared for this kind of opportunity. We are transparent as to how we evaluate search. We publish our rater guidelines, we publish it externally, and raters evaluate it. And that's how we, you know, we are trying hard to understand what users want. 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. Reading through the news, rather than focusing on some of the heavier questions debated, we were treated to gems like this lackadaisical meandering suggesting that Google employees manipulate search results. 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. The irony, of course, should not be lost on us that all of those questions could easily have been answered by a Google search. All that's missing here is an old guy trying to congressman-splain to Sundar Pichai that the internet is really just a series of tubes. Very quickly, it's not possible for an individual employee or groups of employees to manipulate our search results. We have a robust framework, including many steps in the process. My time is up. Let me just say I disagree. I think humans can manipulate the process. It is a human process at its base. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, yield back. I guess we kind of did get that during this hearing. This process of five minutes per committee member is inane and counterproductive. Unless members coordinate to follow up on specific lines of questioning, we'll only ever get generic surface-level commentary. Remind them to understand that 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, do you plan on having a search product there? Right now, there are no plans to launch a search product in China. Even for that five minute limit, though, it's disappointing to see which committee members wasted their time to try and score cheap political points and how that chest puffery is rewarded by the news. If you want positive search results, do positive things. If you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things. To some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you're getting bad press articles and bad search results, don't blame Google or Facebook or Twitter. Consider blaming yourself. But you had the opportunity to inquire about any number of topics, to dig deeper into data collection, privacy, security, international business practices. Ask about the lines drawn between Google functioning as a publisher and as a distribution platform. You had the CEO of Google right in front of you. By contrast, Congresswoman Jayapal made much better use of her time trying to get a specific issue addressed. I've been deeply concerned for some time about employers mandating 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 it's 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. I can't even laugh about this hearing or how it was covered. This is ghastly bad reporting. We deserve better than this. We need better than this. There are so many situations playing out in the near and medium term where we'll need to have nuanced debate. We should be very concerned how many questions Mr. Pichai answered that seem to indicate that algorithms are out of our control. You either fall into the conservative trap, accusations that Google actively manipulates search data, or you position yourself as a helpless bystander before the awesome power of software. We, as Google, we have crawled, we've gone out and crawled and stored copies of billions of webpages in our index. And we take the keyword and match it against webpages and rank them based on over 200 signals. Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best results for that query. That answer isn't necessarily better, especially after a question like this from Representative Lee, detailing one situation where Google can directly influence search results and remove content from their platform. 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? Primary purpose of inciting violence is what we consider as hate speech. Yes, Congressman. And it would be taken down? Yes, we would remove. How should we regulate or safeguard consumer protections in an era of huge data? Will we need to break up big data trusts like Standard Oil? The future of every industry attached to big data hinges on this debate. Security and defense, education, healthcare, our electrical grid, pretty much our whole economy. It's a popular spectator sport to paint all politicians as completely inept, but there were some really good exchanges here. It's almost like some of our elected representatives are learning a few things, especially after train wrecks like the Mark Zuckerberg hearings. I'd recommend anyone concerned about tech policy should just watch the original C-SPAN feed. Put it on like a three-hour podcast and let it run, free of talking heads telling you how you should feel about the questions and answers. What we got as commentary on this event was woefully inadequate. As always, thanks so much for watching, sharing, subscribing. You guys rock. I'll catch you all on the next one.