UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE

To be published as HC 1443-xiv

HOUSE OF COMMONS HOUSE OF LORDS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON PRIVACY AND INJUNCTIONS

MONDAY 30 JANUARY 2012

LORD ALLAN OF HALLAM, DAVID-JOHN COLLINS, DAPHNE KELLER and COLIN CROWELL PHIL HALL and MAX CLIFFORD

Evidence heard in Public

Questions 1384 - 1510

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings. Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant. Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

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Oral Evidence Taken before the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions on Monday 30 January 2012 Members present: Lord Hollick (Chairman) Lord Black of Brentwood Lord Boateng Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury Mr Ben Bradshaw Mr Robert Buckland Baroness Corston Philip Davies Lord Dobbs Paul Farrelly Lord Gold Lord Harries of Pentregarth Martin Horwood Lord Janvrin Eric Joyce Lord Mawhinney Penny Mordaunt Lord Myners Yasmin Qureshi Nadhim Zahawi ________________

Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Lord Allan of Hallam, Director of Policy in Europe, Facebook, David-John (DJ) Collins, Vice-President, Global Policy and Communications, Google, Daphne Keller, Associate General Counsel, Google, and Colin Crowell, Head of Global Public Policy, Twitter, examined. Chairman: Welcome to this meeting of the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions. I would like to give a warm welcome to Colin Crowell, who flew in today from California, so we are able to talk to him in person, particularly in the light of the interesting announcements made by the company last week. Thank you very much for appearing in person. Lord Allan of Hallam is the director of policy in Europe for Facebook; DJ Collins is vice-president, global policy and communications, Google; and Daphne Keller is associate general counsel for Google. Thank you very much for attending. Q1384 Lord Harries of Pentregarth: The values of both privacy and free expression are vital to you. Will you share some of your thinking about how you balance one

2 against the other, particularly on the question of when you give priority to one in particular instances? DJ Collins: Thank you very much, Lord Harries. From Googles perspective both are very important to us. Privacy is underpinned by three fundamental principles at Google: one is transparency, which is to be very clear with the user what information is being collected and stored on their behalf; one is choice, so there is a series of choices throughout the use of the product about settings and how they can best secure their privacy; and also, fundamentally, control. For instance, I may have opened a Google account and want to change some of the settings so some data are not collected. I can do that at any time. Free expression is also incredibly important to us. For the purposes of a summary answer, I would not trade the two of them. The legislation in Europe and the way we run our business make it possible to have both. Free expression is particularly important in the UK but also in other parts of the world. In the middle east we saw the importance of the internet and free expression and what it meant to the populations of countries like Tunisia and Egypt. In summary, both are fundamental to us, but I would not say there is a trade between the two. Lord Allan of Hallam: Unsurprisingly, we would echo many of those sentiments. The notion of control is critical. An individual on a platform like Facebook should be able to share information with the audience they choose to share it with, so they have control over what they are publishing. In terms of freedom of expression, the areas where we come into greatest potential conflict are comments about public figures rather than private individuals. We have rules in place against the bullying and harassment of private individuals. For example, publishing the personal contact details of a private individual would not be allowed on the platform, so we protect their privacy in a certain way, but comments about public figures can be more expansive in the name of freedom of expression. In particular, we sometimes encounter issues of offensive rather than privacy-invasive contentif we can make that distinctionso people can speak very freely about very sensitive subjects like religion and politics on the platform, and we defend that very strongly. That conversation on subjects like religion and politics may be deemed to be offensive by some who read it. Those tend to be the areas of conflict in freedom of expression. Colin Crowell: I echo the comments of my colleagues. Transparency is very important, and privacy and freedom of expression are inextricably linked. The ability to exercise your freedom of expression is tied to your privacy rights. At Twitter we work very hard to safeguard privacy with a communication service that is inherently public, and people go to Twitter to make these public tweets. Q1385 Chairman: Ms Keller, do you want to add to that? Daphne Keller: No. Maybe I should clarify that the reason I am here is as legal director for Web Search. There are lots of fairly specific questions to which I can give concrete answers, but DJ is our policy representative, and I think he has spoken well. Q1386 Nadhim Zahawi: Do your organisations use personal private information for commercial purposes? Lord Allan of Hallam: To understand how Facebook works: our service is free at the point of use and is funded by advertising, which is targeted. For example, if you run a bicycle shop in London, you can target men aged between 30 and 40 in London who like cycling with a particular model of bicycle. The personal information on peoples profiles tells us that they live in London; that they are of that age; and that they like cycling. The advertiser does not get a list of those people; he simply gets a contract with us that says we will show his advertisement to that group of people. The personal information is part of that advertising

3 model, but that model is absolutely not about selling that personal information or sharing it with third parties. Q1387 Nadhim Zahawi: So, you do use it for that model to work? Lord Allan of Hallam: It is used to support that model, which I think is widely understood. We recently had an audit by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. He is the auditor for our operations in Europe. He was quite clear that that kind of model of advertising-funded internet services, on the basis you are not selling the personal data but simply using them to generate an efficient advertising model, was a reasonable offering to our users. We are very explicit in all of our terms of service that that is precisely what we are doing. Colin Crowell: Twitter is very similar. We use the information internally to render service and continue to try to improve Twitter. Q1388 Nadhim Zahawi: Does Twitter use the behavioural information, or just the private information? Colin Crowell: We use the information only internally to render and deliver the tweets for the purposes of our advertising products. We are able to see, for example, whether a promoted tweet is being clicked on frequently. That tells us whether or not to serve that to more people, but we do not disclose or otherwise share that personal information with advertisers. Q1389 Nadhim Zahawi: But do you use the way people behave, in that you monitor how they are looking at stuff? Colin Crowell: Not as individuals. Our service is a publicly rendered one and whom you follow is publicly displayed, so it is on the basis of whom you follow, not who you are as an individual. DJ Collins: If I may answer for Google, we built in a couple of safeguards for users. For example, we have a product called the Ads Preference Manager. You can see for yourself what we think you might be interested in. It is a series of guesses on our part. You can either change those assumptions or say you do not want to be served any at all, so there is a high degree of control for the user. We do not sell peoples personal data to third parties. Q1390 Nadhim Zahawi: Can the user opt for you not to watch what they are doing or use their private information? DJ Collins: As I just mentioned, we have a product called the Ads Preference Manager, which is a pretty easy tool to use. You can say that you are not interested in cars but in adverts on gardening because that is what you like to do in your spare time. That is easy to do. But you can also switch it off. A fundamental point is that the reason so much content is free on the internet is that it is supported by advertising. The choice for companies like ours is whether we provide hopelessly irrelevant advertising to people or advertising that is helpful and good for the advertiser, because they are getting it in front of the right audience; that is better for the user, because advertising is information like anything else; and that is also good for the publisher of the website, who often has a revenue share. The question is: do you also give the user maximum control over that process? Q1391 Nadhim Zahawi: And do you? DJ Collins: The Ads Preference Manager, on which I am very happy to supply information afterwards, gives the user a very high degree of control.

4 Q1392 Lord Mawhinney: It is my fault, but I am a little confused. To try to clarify, all three of you started off by making it very clear that, when it comes to public figures, it is reasonably open season, but you do not focus on private individuals. I can understand that; it is quite simple. You went on to say that you made a lot of use of personal information and it had a commercial edge to it. Forgive me if you think I am being overly cynical, but that will not reduce; it is likely to increase with time. What is it about your evidence that should lead this Committee to believe there is genuine personal protection at the moment and that will not be eroded as the commercial pressures increase? Lord Allan of Hallam: The strongest argument I can make is that the internet space is a highly competitive marketplace. Our consumers literally have millions of services to choose from and are willing and able to make choices about which services they use. Facebook is absolutely clear that, if we do not live up to the trust people place in us by storing personal data on our service, our business cannot function. Our business incentives are completely aligned with meeting the commitment we have made to people. The commitment is very clear: we will share the information with the audience they have selected, not one we have selected. They choose the audience, which is very up front; but also the deal we offer to people is very clear. It says that this service is free to usewe know from our user base that is what they wanton the basis that we do something reasonable, which is to show them targeted advertising. As DJ said, if the advertising is well targeted, it is more and not less acceptable to the user. Q1393 Lord Mawhinney: But it is only more acceptable to the user because you have already plundered personal information against the background of we dont do the personal. In this highly competitive marketplace, the commercial pressures will increase and, therefore, the pressure to make use of even more personal information is likely to be exacerbated. Isnt that the case? DJ Collins: I understand the point you are making. I can speak only on behalf of Google. As to the first question you asked, I want to make very clear that, whether you are a high-profile public person or a private citizen, there is no difference in the way we target advertising. The point I made in answer to an earlier question was how much control is given to the user over the advertising they will see in their online experience. The first point I make about Google services is that we are very transparent about the collection, storage and use of those data. Second, there is a really easy tool to useI hate to labour the pointcalled the Ads Preference Manager, which can turn on and off the various forms of advertising that you will see. Interestingly, our research shows that when people use that tool it is generally not to turn it off but to say to Google, Youre making the wrong assumptions about me. I am actually interested in this, not that, and I would like to see advertising on this, not that. It is more a mistake on our part about the form, nature and content of the advertising rather than seeing the advertising itself. Colin Crowell: From Twitters perspective, our ad products are slightly different from those of the other services, in the sense we do not use personally identifiable information for serving the ads. It is based on non-personally identifiable public followership in the Twitter timeline. Q1394 Martin Horwood: I am quite comfortable about providing my personal information to your companies and getting ads in return, but clearly it is theoretically possible you could go beyond that and sell personal data or allow direct access by advertisers or direct marketers. At the moment that is illegal in the UK because of data protection law, and presumably also in Germany and many other jurisdictions, but not all. Do you obey the

5 jurisdiction where you happen to be, or do you expect jurisdictions around the world to be respected for different users? DJ Collins: I cannot speak for the whole of the internet, but from Googles perspective Lord Allan made a very good point, which is that the relationship with our users is dependent on trust. The trust goes way beyond what is legally compliant in one country. In respect of peoples personal data, we do not sell them to third parties; there are no plans to do so. Whatever we do in terms of advertising is always based on how we provide the most relevant information but also how we maintain that bond of trust with our users. Q1395 Martin Horwood: The principal question I am asking is: do you do that on the basis of only trying to maintain a commercial interest in that trust, or are you trying to obey the different jurisdictions in which users operate? To give a different example, let us say somebody did not want lots of ads to be generated on their home PC because they had been looking up divorce lawyers. I do not want anyone to read anything into that particular example. You can see how somebody might think their privacy had been invaded even then. It might be held to be a breach of data protection law. Would you obey the jurisdiction in which the user was located, or the jurisdiction where you sit? Daphne Keller: You are right to point to the question of jurisdiction, which matters a lot to us when it comes to questions about what content should be removed from our public services on legal grounds. For example, what search results should appear on the Google.co.uk service? On the question discussed so far about the privacy obligations to users, obviously we comply with the law, but this is also driven deeply by principles that are held and implemented consistently throughout our global operations. Q1396 Martin Horwood: Whose law are you trying to obey: the one where you sit or the one where the user sits? Daphne Keller: Both. Q1397 Martin Horwood: Is that also true of Facebook? Lord Allan of Hallam: I can give a specific example. Each company will have come to a different arrangement depending on how it has evolved. For example, if you are somebody in the UK using our service and storing your data with us, Facebook Ireland Ltd is the company with whom you have a contract and provides services to you. Facebook Ireland Ltd is a data controller under Irish and, by extension, EU law, so you have your full European Union data protection rights that you can exercise with Facebook Ireland Ltd. That company then contracts with Facebook Incorporated to process data. Facebook Incorporated is supervised by the Federal Trade Commission. Is this supervised and is there jurisdictional control? In our case we would say there are two layers. As a UK citizen you have your European Union rights exercisable through Facebook Ireland Ltd. We had an audit just before Christmas that went through our compliance with EU law. But you also have the additional protection of the Federal Trade Commission, which has undertakings with all our companies to supervise certain aspects of our behaviour in respect of privacy. Q1398 Martin Horwood: You are saying that I am protected by Irish and not British data protection law? Lord Allan of Hallam: Exactlybecause your contract is with an Irish company. Q1399 Martin Horwood: And if you chose to move to another jurisdiction in future?

6 Lord Allan of Hallam: In our case, if you are outside the US and Canada, your contract will be with Facebook Ireland Ltd. Daphne Keller: For purposes of the data protection rights of UK citizens, I think we are operating in full compliance with UK law. That is the intention. Q1400 Nadhim Zahawi: To ensure this crystal clear, in all three organisations the contract with the individual is that you offer this free service, which is fantastic for all sorts of reasons, but in return you use both personal and behavioural data to generate income. That is not changeable; the individual cannot switch that off and opt not to have that contract? DJ Collins: First, in Googles case you can log out of your account. Secondly, I would not characterise the relationship with our users in that respect. For Web Search the relationship is based on your putting in a query and Google doing its utmost to provide the most relevant set of results for you. If you have a Google account, they will become more personalised. You are absolutely right in saying that our aim is to provide all forms of information relevant to you. That is partly what we call in our jargon natural search results, so it is nonadvertising. It would also be advertising because advertising is also information. By the way, e-commerce now provides over 7% of the UKs GDP, and a large proportion of that is online advertising. It is one of the only sectors of the economy that is powering forward at the present time. The other thing to say is that we are very transparent about that. At the moment someone opens a Google account, we give them maximum control via something called the Ads Preference Manager over exactly what form of advertising they see. They can turn it on and off and change the settings at any moment, and we market that feature very heavily. Colin Crowell: Twitters ad products are not based upon building a highly detailed personal profile of who you are as an individual. Our ad products, therefore, do not utilise personally identifiable information but your publicly available followership for everyone to see where those ads are placed on Twitters service. Lord Allan of Hallam: For Facebook, it is the data you put on your profile, which include objects that you like on the service, the difference being that we are always advertising directly to users who have signed up to our service, whereas a lot of other web advertising is to third parties on third-party websites. But within our model it is very clear that it is the data you put on to your profile and the activity you carry out, such as liking objects on the site. Q1401 Nadhim Zahawi: But for that free service, people have no option to switch it off? Lord Allan of Hallam: No; otherwise we cannot provide it. Q1402 Nadhim Zahawi: How easy is it for an individual to contact you when they have a problem with private information being displayed; and how well do you think you serve them? Daphne Keller: Maybe I can start by describing what it is we do with Google Web Search. The results that show up in Googles Web Search are not content that we have created; they are published by third parties and put up on servers for websites we do not control. We are undertaking to index them neutrally and show relevant results. We do not want to show results in violation of law, and we have a very clear process for people to let us know when something should not be there so we can take it down. I will spell out two different processes.

7 One is for the webmaster, the person who has put the content online in the first place. It is a fundamental tenet of our business, and any search engines business, that if the webmaster does not want to show up in search results, then he or she should not. That should be within their control. There are several mechanisms for them to ensure that something does not show up. If they do not want to be in Web Search, they can use a technical direction called Robots.txt. For example, if a newspaper publishes something and realises it is violating someones privacy and needs to come down, one thing they can do is take it down from their site, and that will be reflected the next time we visit it and refresh our index. In a more urgent case, the webmaster can go to a public-facing tool, called the cache removal tool, and enter the address of the page at issuebut not the reason it needs to be removed, because he can control itand it will come down very swiftly. We also have people who can help with the process in an emergency. The reason that process is good is that the webmaster controls the place in which the privacy-invasive content is appearing, so if he takes it down the problem is solved at root, whereas if only Google takes it out of search results, which is the next process I will describe, people will find it; it is still there. They might follow a link to the page that they received in an email, or they saw on another page, or in a tweet or whatever. To describe that second mechanism, if a user has their privacy rights violated and it is on a website and they do not want that website to show up in Googles search results, we have a public-facing web form they use to let us know about that page. If you search in Google the phrase remove content from Google you will find both of the tools I am talking about. The one for users to tell us about legal violations is very similar to the cache removal tool. You tell us the page; the legal basis for the problem; you click a button and submit it; it comes to my team in Mountain View in California; and we review it. If they have identified a violation of UK law, we remove it from our UK search service. The optimal thing from our perspective is that often people will send us an actual court order or decision issued against a third-party site that says a court has weighed the facts and the public interest defencewhatever nuances of law may be in issueand determined that there is a violation. That takes us as a technical intermediary out of the middle and lets us know what to remove. Q1403 Nadhim Zahawi: How permanent is that removal? For example, can you tag pictures? We had evidence from Max Mosley who said: One can easily underestimate the internet. The News of the World made a film of my party and took extracts from it and put it on the web. Those pictures from it are still there. If you search my name you will find them on Google. You may have to go down a little way but you will find them. Every time we say to Google that that picture has been ruled illegal by a court and it is against the law to put it out, they take it down, but they insist on your asking each time. Daphne Keller: First, in this case we have removed hundreds of individual third-party web pages so they no longer show up in our search results. The idea there is that Google should be able or have to figure out what other URLs might also have the same content. To be clear, that is not something we can deal with by just flicking a switch. We do not have a mechanism that finds duplicates of pictures or text and makes them disappear from our Web Search results. As a matter of policy, I do not think that would be a good idea, simply because an algorithm or computer programme that tried to do something like that would not have the ability of a judge or any person to see the context and whether a particular phrase is appearing in a news report or in political commentary.

8 Q1404 Nadhim Zahawi: What if it is the same picture or video? I come back to my question about how well you think you service the people who are offended or affected by this sort of thing. Surely, you must have the technical capability to remove those. Daphne Keller: To search the internet and automatically make everything with a particular Q1405 Nadhim Zahawi: If it is the same photograph or video? Daphne Keller: This is not something where we can flick a switch. Q1406 Nadhim Zahawi: You do not have the technical ability to remove the same content? Daphne Keller: Right. It is not something we have built out. To emphasise what I think would be the potential harm of having a technical filter trying to do what a judge usually does, the small businesses online that were inadvertently harmed through an error of an algorithm would lose their traffic from Google and would not necessarily even know and have recourse. I will give a quick personal story. I am the mother of two young children and I miss them; I have been here for a week. Last week I tried to look up pictures of them on my mobile phone. I have pictures that my husband took, which are hosted on Flickr, which is a photo-hosting product. When I tried to look at them on my mobile phone, my UK mobile carrier said that I could not see them unless I was over 18, and would not let me check the box to say I was over 18. I am sure this was a well-intentioned effort to filter out unlawful content, but the consequencebecause algorithms are not that good at thisis that a travelling mother cannot see pictures of her children that she took herself and her husband uploaded. Q1407 Martin Horwood: If a Syrian court presented you with an order that ruled that using the Arab word for freedom was illegal in that jurisdiction, would you and could you lock that search term in that area? Daphne Keller: That is a very interesting question. Could we just block a search term? That is another thing we just could not do by flipping a switch. We have not built this out. On the question of compliance with a Syrian court order, obviously we would have to look at that if it came about. That sounds like something that is extremely troubling from a policy perspective. DJ Collins: I do not think you can ban people from making searches. What Daphne has explained is the consequence of making certain searches and your ability to find that content. I am not aware of our having a Syrian court order. I do not think they tend to do things in that way. Q1408 Martin Horwood: You did something comparable in China, didnt you? DJ Collins: I am very happy to give a brief explanation of China because it is slightly different from banning people from making a search. To go back a little, in 2006 as a company we decided to launch something called Google.cn, which was our Chinese search service. As part of that, obviously we had to comply with Chinese law, some of which was to do with self-censorship. It is not a question of banning somebody from making a search but what information you can serve back to the query being made. History has moved on immensely since 2006. In January 2010 we announced very publicly that we were no longer prepared to do that given a number of incidents and the fact that the internet restrictions in China had increased significantly. We no longer operate that. If you do a search in China on Google.cn, the query is served from Hong Kong.

Q1409 Baroness Corston: Max Mosley told us that he and his legal representatives had a very high-level meeting with Google in which he said: Here are the pictures. We know which ones they are. Simply programme your search engine so they dont appear. His evidence continued: That is demonstrably technically feasible. They refused to do it as a matter of principle. If that is true, which principle is being breached? Daphne Keller: There are a couple of principles. To go back to the fundamentals, we are not the publishers of this content; it is put up on third-party sites and we do not control them. One of the important principles for us is to avoid over-filtering and the potential harm from mis-identifying perfectly lawful information. This is not something that is built and exists and one can flick a switch. To look at the larger regulatory framework, Google and hosting services, such as Facebook and Twitter, operate under the E-Commerce Directive and the implementing legislation in the UK. That set up a notice and take-down regime. The case of Scarlet v SABAM before the European Court of Justice dealt with precisely this question: should proactive monitoring be required, assuming it is possible, under the E-Commerce Directive? The court said no, and that the attempt under the E-Commerce Directive to make an intermediary proactively monitor not only raised serious policy issues about access to information and free speech but also was not consistent with the letter of the Directive. Q1410 Baroness Corston: If, as Max Mosley said, the content had already been ruled by a court of law to be illegally obtained, I do not understand which principle you are addressing. Daphne Keller: To reiterate, we have taken down hundreds of URLs in that case. Q1411 Mr Bradshaw: But at his request; he has to request every single one, and you have the ability to do it yourselves. Daphne Keller: We do not; somebody has to go out and identify the URLs. He is able to do that. We are happy to help in any way, but ultimately the determination of which web pages violate the law is for a court or person to make rather than an algorithm to go out and make potentially erroneous conclusions about what should come down. Q1412 Lord Mawhinney: Your position is that Mr Mosley was misleading Parliament when he said it was demonstrably technically feasible to do this. Your answer is, We havent built that in; in other words, We are choosing not to do it. Is it demonstrably technically feasible, as he told us, or is your evidence that it is not demonstrably, or even technically, feasible? Daphne Keller: I do not doubt that someone could build such a thing, so I do not mean to draw a conclusion one way or another about someone elses evidence. We have public services that help people look for duplicate images, but ultimately the decision about whether something is unlawful or what an algorithm has said is correct is something for a human to make. Q1413 Lord Gold: I do not fully understand that. If you have the software that can find them, presumably it can go one step further and destroy them. Is that not right? Daphne Keller: We certainly cannot destroy them. Lord Gold: Why not? If you can find them, why can you not destroy them? Q1414 Chairman: Let us try to have one at a time. Lord Allan, would you like to deal with that?

10 Lord Allan of Hallam: It may help the Committee to think of it in the context of a much broader policy debate about the internet, where across a range of different issues, like images involving child abuse, copyright material and so on, people are trying to come to the right public policy decision, which balances two important principles. One is that people are free to speak on the internet and are responsible for their own actions. The providers are not primarily responsible for filtering and determining what people say, which means you need to go to the endpoint rather than to the provider to deal with a lot of these issues. That can be very frustrating, but the settled view on a lot of these issues is the notice and take-down method, where you identify a piece of offending content, give notice and then a service provider takes it down or takes another form of action. That is the settled view on a lot of things, but you are right that in many areas public policy makers are saying, Cant you go further? In some instances we have. We have implemented something called Photo DNA, a technology provided by Microsoft and others. That compares images uploaded to our service with a few thousand of the worst images involving child abuse on the database held by the United States authorities. It is technically possible to do that. We have taken the policy decision to do that because the offence is so serious in this case that we felt it was justified. There is a valid public policy decision for others to decide how much further to go with that. Do we go to privacy-related material, copyright-related material and so on? Those are valid public policy debates. From the technical point of view, the limitation is that there are billions of photos being uploaded every day. To run that comparison against a few tens of thousands of the worst offending photos is technically possible. Once you start adding in everything else, you will reach the limits of what is technically possible. I hope that is helpful in clarifying where we are. Q1415 Yasmin Qureshi: Ms Keller and Lord Allan, you talked generally about public policy. Basically, what both of you have been saying is, We try to be good and delete some information, and we are quite good in some areas but, when it comes to the bottom-line question, Ms Keller said that technically somebody could develop that software. Bearing in mind what Google is worth, are you really telling us that companies as technically sophisticated as yours cannot delete permanently information of the kind referred to by Mr Mosley? Public policy is not an issue here. We are asking about the possibility of this being deleted properly. DJ Collins: The three companies represented here are successful ones born of the internet, but we are not the internet. Even if, for instance, this tool was developed by one of the companies and it could remove content from Google search results, or from a Facebook page or a tweet, it still exists on the internet. The companies here today are not the only three ways by which people will access content on the internet. It may sound an obvious point, but I refer to the comment Daphne made at the start. The most effective way for anyone to deal with content that they feel infringes their privacy is to go to the person who uploaded it. We are a way of finding that content. But if you remove it from the Google search result, and we decided to go down that road, it would still exist on the internet. It is important to recognise that the three companies here, successful as they have become, are not the whole of the internet. Q1416 Yasmin Qureshi: No. For example, if I go into Google and I want to see pictures of naked babies, you will not allow me to see those pictures, even though there are pictures of naked babies on the internet? How are you able to regulate yourselves on that, whereas when it comes to more salacious gossipy stuff you simply suggest that somehow you cannot do it?

11 DJ Collins: The point has been made about the worst images involving child abuse. There is a clear global consensus across just about every jurisdiction in the world that this stuff is illegal and morally abhorrent for obvious reasons. That is why the three companies take the stance they do. On issues around privacy and defamation, there are very different laws in different countries. What is defamatory in one country is not necessarily defamatory in another. The reason why the issue of images involving child abuse comes up is that every country agrees on it and you can have a clear, uniform policy in every jurisdiction. Q1417 Yasmin Qureshi: You said earlier that once on the net it is difficult to control. The fact is that these images exist on the net. You are obviously able to control them and to say, No, we cant show these. Why is it that in the case of Max Mosley effectively you are suggesting you cannot do it? Is not the answer that you can do it, but basically all of your companies do not want to do it in those sorts of cases? Daphne Keller: It is fundamentally the same process for images involving child abuse and other illegal images, which is that we learn about a particular address that has the illegal content and remove it from the search results. What is different about content involving child abuse is that there are some great self-regulatory industry bodies that have developed to address this. In the UK it is the IWF; in the US it is NCMEC; and in Germany it is BPjM. They bring together industry resources to identify a list of URLs and distribute them so that we can all move very quickly to take them down. As DJ was saying, what is different is that it is possible for an entity like IWF to know this abhorrent content when they see it and put it on a list. That is what enables the really solid self-regulation of the industry that you see in that area. Q1418 Lord Janvrin: Perhaps I may come back to the issue of an injunction safeguarding someones privacy in the UK? What is the policy of each of your companies on upholding that injunction? Do you actively look for ways in which you can uphold that injunction, or do you simply wait until someone complains? Colin Crowell: We announced last Thursday that we had reached a point in the evolution of our company as we grow internationallysimilar to the points reached earlier by Facebook and Googlewhere we will be able to recognise that the contours of freedom of expression may differ from country to country. Where those limits are in the UK may be different from the United States, Turkey or Peru. One thing to recognise with respect to Twitter is that the policy it announced last Thursday is essentially one that will allow us to address illegal content in a particular country on a case-by-case basis. When we receive notice from an authorised entity, our policy will be to notify the user and to be transparent if that content, or tweet, is withheld. It will be transparent to the users in that country that it has been withheld subsequently, but it will otherwise be available in the rest of the world, so it will allow us to cater for individual countries in that way. We have never been served with a formal injunction, so I do not have any examples of that. I do not know how that would work in practice. Twitter will turn six in May this year. It took three years and two months to go from the first tweet to the billionth. We now serve a billion tweets every four days, and that number is growing. We do not mediate or filter content ahead of time. That is a policy but also a practical impediment. We will have the ability to come in reactively and withhold a tweet in certain jurisdictionsthat is similar to the processes these other companies implemented earlier. We announced our ability to do that last week. Q1419 Mr Bradshaw: I want to give Google another opportunity to answer the question about the case involving Max Mosley. I found your earlier answers totally

12 unconvincing. You are basically saying that you could do it if you wanted to, as you do with child pornography, but you choose not to in this case. Why should an individual like Max Mosley, who happens to be wealthy so he can afford to, spend all this time and money targeting these individual sites when you have masses of resources and could help him, or someone with less money, to stop what is an illegal film being put on the internet? Daphne Keller: To be clear, the legal removals process I described is free. It is a web form; it has nothing to do with the transfer of money, and anyone can use it in any jurisdiction. Maybe I have not been clear on content involving child abuse, which is also based on the identification of specific web pages that have unlawful content and their removal from our search results. That is exactly the same mechanism that is available for persons seeking removal on grounds of privacy or defamation. Q1420 Mr Bradshaw: Why do you not do it for him? Daphne Keller: We have removed hundreds of URLs in this case. Q1421 Mr Bradshaw: But he has to request every one individually. You will not do a blanket removal for him. He has to spend time and money doing it. He can do it because he is wealthy, but an ordinary citizen whose privacy has been destroyed in the same way by an illegal act would not have that time and money. Daphne Keller: The thing we have not undertaken to doand, again, I think as a policy matter it could be quite dangerous to ask intermediaries to undertake itis search for and disappear content based on an algorithm. What was at issue in the Scarlet v SABAM case that I mentioned earlier was whether, consistent with the E-Commerce Directivewhich is the regulatory framework hereit made sense to have an intermediary attempt to deploy a technology of that sort in lieu of people looking at content and making informed decisions. Lord Mawhinney: Ms Keller, I hope you will take it as a compliment if I say you are extremely hard to pin down. Daphne Keller: I am not trying to be. Q1422 Lord Mawhinney: You have ducking and diving down to a fine art, and I congratulate you. I have never met Mr Mosley. I saw him once when he gave evidence; other than that, I do not know the man, so my question is not motivated by anything other than trying to do the job that this Committee has been set up to do. As I understand it, there are certain photographs that a court has deemed illegal. When he goes to you, you say, Well take them down. He says, But theyre all over the place. Your evidence is that it is technically feasible for you to initiate a take-down procedure that gets them all, but as a matter of policyyour wordyou have decided not to do that. If the media in reporting this were to say that Google will take down what they are asked to take down but will not, as a matter of policy, make sure there is nothing else illegally represented, would you sue them? Daphne Keller: My evidence is not that it is technically feasible to do this. I do not dispute that perhaps someone could build such a thing. My policy point is that I think doing so is a bad idea, and this is what underpins the E-Commerce Directive and the notice and take-down framework within which all three of us operate. Q1423 Eric Joyce: If I may labour the point slightly, most people would agree that there is a general presumption against taking stuff down unless there is a very strong reason. It seems to me that sometimes child pornography is used as a Trojan horse. People say you can do it in this extreme case, so you should do it in all these other cases. At the other end, if you take something like copyright, it seems to me there are lots of arguable cases, so if you

13 automatically took stuff down, lots of stuff would be taken down that should not be taken down. The example of Max Mosley is quite an interesting one because it is such a celebrated case. The question is whether it comes above or below the threshold. I would not want to see that threshold lowered too easily, because otherwise you would get millions of requests every day to take down lots of images, and maybe some would end up going back up again. One thing I discovered quite recently was that Google regards itself as a re-publisher of a lot of blogs and content like that. One of the reasons it gives for not automatically taking content down on request is that they are a re-publisher and you have to go to the original publisher of the content to ask him to take it down. If a newspaper publishes something that has already gone to court and been found to be unlawful, the next publisherthe re-publisherwill also be taken to court. It does not indemnify them because they are re-publishing it. How does that work with Google? Daphne Keller: I am not sure what counts as a re-publisher under UK law, so I do not want to be too technical on that. Q1424 Eric Joyce: If someone blogs on the Google blogging service, the Google advice is that you cannot approach Google but the blogger in the first place because Google is a re-publisher. That is what it says on the website. That does not indemnify a normal newspaper. Daphne Keller: In all of these cases, because we are not the creator of the content and cannot ultimately take it off the internet, we strongly encourage people to take it up with the person who is in control of itthe blogger in the case of a blog. We do, however, ultimately process legal removals in cases where it is our obligation to do so. Let me tell you a little bit about the kinds of things that we see. We had a case involving a blogger in the UK. The Davison case was a true he said, she said situation. Basically, the blogger made some allegations about a person, who said they were a lie. The blogger came back and said they were true, and Google did not take it down. We ended up going to court in that case. The court said there is no way that a technical intermediary like Google can know what is right and wrong in a fact-intensive situation like that. I would addthis was not part of the casethat it is very difficult to ask a technical intermediary to apply a public interest defence and the other legal nuances that exists here. This is why we look to court orders when we can to get that kind of determination. Q1425 Eric Joyce: What if the blogger is anonymised and does not respond to questions put by somebody who feels there is something posted that should not be? Daphne Keller: That is why ultimately we operate within the notice and take-down regime, and we comply with removals where that is our legal obligation. Q1426 Lord Dobbs: We have heard that Twitter has the technical ability to discriminate between different countries. Does that apply also to Google and Facebook? Do you have the same technical ability? Lord Allan of Hallam: We do this differently from one another. There are really two ways in which internet services have gone. Q1427 Lord Dobbs: I was hoping for a yes or no answer. The question itself is very simple. You either do or you do not. If you want to answer at greater length, I will come back to a yes or no answer. Lord Allan of Hallam: I will set the context very quickly and then do that. There are two ways. One is to create different domains, so you can have .co.uk, .fr and .de for different countries and change the service according to the domain. The other method, which is ours,

14 is to have only one domain, so Facebook is one global community. If you decide that you will have only one domain and one global community, you need to look at other methods to be legally compliant. One of those methods is sometimes, in limited cases, to restrict the geographical access to particular pieces of content. It is not very precise and it is not universally available; it is something you generally have to engineerTwitter has the same thingbecause the need has arisen from your experience where you have been served with a court order. You do not want to take the content down globally because it is generally legal, but you need a restriction in a particular country. Therefore, we have developed that technology for some content on the Facebook.com domain. Q1428 Lord Dobbs: Do I take that as a modified yes? Lord Allan of Hallam: It is a yes but with important qualifications. Q1429 Lord Dobbs: May I ask the same question of Google, please? Daphne Keller: Yes. For a web search we operate country-specific services in compliance with different laws, and we fall into the first category described, which is to use the country top-level domain to identify which countrys laws are applicable. Q1430 Lord Dobbs: You talked earlier about privacy laws being different in various countries, which is absolutely right. The threshold varies from country to country. Therefore, whether a story is illegal or unlawful will depend on the particular country threshold, but if it is manifestly illegal in one country, why is it not possible to go a long way along that road to blocking access to that unlawful story or picture in that specific country? Daphne Keller: I think this goes back to the same point. We cannot block that access. The content sits on third-party services. People get to them by means other than Google: because their friend sent them a link in an email, or they saw the link in a tweet, or they followed a link from another webpage. Not to belabour the obvious, Google is not the internet. Google can process removals in the ways I have described from its Web Search resultsthe thing we do operatebut it could not literally undertake to block content sitting on third-party sites. Q1431 Mr Bradshaw: But you could stop them getting access to it through your search engine, which is how most people find it. In the Max Mosley case, 99.9% of people find that illegal stuff through your search engine. You could stop that happening. Daphne Keller: And we are processing hundreds of removals.

Q1432 Lord Dobbs: There are billions of stories out there, but we are talking here of specific stories in specific countries. Therefore, the numbers involved must, surely, be amenable at least to getting in the way of free access to something that is manifestly unlawful. We are not expecting you to wave a magic wand and, all of a sudden, everybody would be satisfied, far from it; we know that cannot happen, any more than any law can do that. It seems you have the technical ability, though perhaps not the will, to do this, but if a court has ruled a story illegal in Germany, Sweden, America or Britain you will do absolutely nothing, unless forced, to comply with that court ruling. Daphne Keller: I think we have done quite a bit through the removals processes I have described. I want to be clear on the numbers here. The hundreds figure that I referenced relates just to that case. For copyright alone, last year we removed 5 million pages from our searches.

15 Q1433 Lord Dobbs: I do not want you to go down an alley I have not directed you down. We are talking here about court orders. I do not suppose you are talking of millions of court orders that arrive at Google. Daphne Keller: No. Q1434 Lord Dobbs: That is what I want to focus upon, please. What is preventing you, if you get a legitimate court order, from using your technology at least to block it in the country in which that court order applies? Daphne Keller: Where the court order applies to particular URLs that are identified, we remove them; we remove them very quickly and we have a streamlined process. It does not cost money. We are working very hard to comply with the lawsthis is what my team doesand we are there to process requests when they come in. Q1435 Penny Mordaunt: When you were describing the difference between child pornography and a privacy case, like the Mosley case, you mentioned there was greater international consensus, more legislation and policing groups and forums in operation. Given that this is an area of concern and it is costing individuals a lot of moneythe service is free, but they have to spend enormous amounts of time doing thiswould it help to have more legislation in this area and to have a privacy law that might cover this area? Would you call for more legislation to help you turn the Mosley situation into more of a slam-dunk case, as with child pornography? DJ Collins: Richard, Daphne and I gave answers to similar questions in evidence to the Leveson Inquiry last week when this issue came up. Lord Justice Leveson asked almost the same question, which was: Should there be a regulatory system, whether enforced by law or by a self-regulatory method, that gives people much clearer redress when they feel their privacy has been infringed? What I said in answer to himI think the answer is the same hereis that, in any system you recommend as a result of this inquiry, we would look for the same things as you: is it robust, fair, exhaustive, inquisitive, adversarial when necessary, and is justice clearly being done? I do not want to speculate about what that regulation or law should be. We are very happy to provide input as you develop your ideas, but the bottom line is that we comply with the law of this country. I do not think that is a point we have been able to get over clearly today. Our services on .co.uk absolutely comply with the laws of this country. In respect of future regulation and laws in this area, as you develop it we would love to contribute and give you our thoughts, if you would like us to. Q1436 Penny Mordaunt: Does anyone else want to contribute to that? Lord Allan of Hallam: Two questions are in operation. One is about what constitutes a valid notice, such as we get today. How do you determine that something is so offensive against UK law that a notice should be generated and given to us and then we take down the content? That is how we all operate today. We get a court order, which constitutes a valid form of notification. I have checked with our legal teams, and they have said they cannot imagine circumstances where we would not respect a valid UK court order, because it would be content that is illegal in the UK and in most cases in contravention of our own terms of service. That is one question that I think is relatively straightforward. The other, much more difficult, one is: should service providers be required pre-emptively to filter for content? I entirely expect that question to be asked. All of us as internet companies would probably be extremely cautious about that, because we see a genuine risk that you arrive at the lowest common denominator, where every country in the world starts throwing notices at us, with heavy penalties if we do not pre-filter the content, and we end up with a very reduced common space on the internet. That is our overriding

16 concern and is an issue of principle for us, recognising that creates frustration for those who are trying to operate the current notice and take-down system. To add some context, the debate about pre-filtering and the possible negative consequences, as well as the clear benefits to an individual complainant, is running like wildfire at the moment across a huge number of areas. I would look particularly at the copyright debate, because in a sense that is the most advanced and the one where the greatest effort has been invested, and that has not come to a clear conclusion about the responsibilities of the service provider versus the individual posting content. Q1437 Lord Myners: The three companies you represent are all very new in terms of corporations. You celebrate being young and informal. Google in its 10-point philosophy says that you do not have to wear a suit to be taken seriously, although perhaps Mr Collins and Ms Keller do not want us to take them seriously, but thank you very much for wearing your suits. At what level within your organisations are issues of ethics discussed? Does the Google board discuss these matters? Has it had a proper discussion about these complex interfaces between privacy and right to know? How does the rest of the world know how Google, Twitter and Facebook have reached conclusions on these matters? DJ Collins: I am sure we will all give you the same answer. Lord Myners: I am sure. DJ Collins: In terms of privacy, it is taken very seriously at every level of the company. It is not a decision taken at the board which everyone else ignores, and it is not a decision or discussion that Daphne and I have on our own in a corner of the company and no one else takes any notice. We have a very strong privacy governance model led by the most senior management of the company. Q1438 Lord Myners: You are not answering my question. That has been a practice of you and your colleague throughout a lot of this session. Has it been discussed by your board of directors? Where do we find a clear statement of where you judge the dividing line to rest between privacy and right to know? DJ Collins: Privacy as an issue is absolutely discussed by our board. Q1439 Lord Myners: Where do we find your policy on this matter? DJ Collins: Last week we announced our new privacy policy for users. That is agreed at the highest level in the company. That is our clearest possible statement on how we view privacy and our users, and the relationship between the two. We published that on our home page last week. Q1440 Lord Myners: Are you finding it harder to do no evil than you originally said was your corporate mantra? DJ Collins: No, not at all. There are a number of benefits of the internet as a whole. The ability of Google to open up the worlds information to people who previously did not have access to that information has been a fundamental benefit for society. My colleagues here also represent many other benefits of the internet. To go back to the privacy point, I encourage people to look at that privacy policy we published on our home page last week. Lord Allan of Hallam: The debates on these issues go to the highest levels. We have something called our statement of rights and responsibilities, which defines the contract between ourselves and the users of Facebook. We develop what is effectively internal case law because we will hit a difficult situation. An activist will come to us and say they would like to use the site not under their real name. Facebook has a policy that says you should use the service under your real name. That kind of debatewhether we should adjust our policy

17 or maintain itwill go all the way up to the senior management of the company, indeed to board level. Q1441 Lord Myners: Would Facebook, Google and Twitter be willing to share with this Committee their board papers on this matter, redacted if necessary to protect information which is commercially confidential, as evidence to us of how high these issues are considered within those organisations? Lord Allan of Hallam: I cannot make that commitment here, but I will ask. What I can say is that, if you look on Facebook.com/communitystandards, you will see the product of that. We publish for everybody the outcome of those deliberations, and that defines what kind of content is and is not acceptable on the service. Q1442 Lord Myners: Will all three of you write to the Committee and give us that information, or explain why you do not feel you can be as open about yourselves as you seem to be willing to be open about other peoples lives? DJ Collins: We are certainly very happy to do so after the Committee hearing. Q1443 Lord Myners: Mr Crowell? Colin Crowell: Having more recently than the other two companies reached a certain point in our international growth, we announced only last Thursday our ability to tailor these things narrowly on a country-by-country basis. This was discussed at the highest levels of the company and was reflected in a blog post put out by our general counsel last Thursday, which we would be happy to provide to the Committee. Q1444 Lord Myners: I am asking to see some evidence of what was discussed in the boardroom and how it was presented to the board in terms of the ethical issues that you have to confront, not a blog post. I am asking to see the papers that your board considered. Colin Crowell: My answer would be the same: I would be happy to go back and ask and respond to the Committee. Q1445 Nadhim Zahawi: The difficulty here for Mr Collins and Ms Keller is that, as was rightly pointed out in the case of China, Google is able to filter what results come back to people from the searches. You cannot control what they search for but you can certainly filter it. I think the most direct answer we have had is from Lord Allanthat is, that the reason he is against it in principle, as I understand it, is that it will probably result in a scaled-down internet, and in terms of what information is available it will not be of such high quality. That is why in principle you are opposed to doing anything about the Max Mosley case on a permanent basis, because technically you can do something about it. Part of the difficulty you have got yourself into in this session is precisely because you have not been quite straight on this. You are able to do it in China because you can filter per country, but you pulled out of China, quite rightly. Technically, you can do it but in principle you did not want to. Daphne Keller: Perhaps I may talk a little about how removals worked in China. I have tried very hard to be quite transparent here, so I am happy to clarify things. Nadhim Zahawi: There is obviously a perception gap here. Daphne Keller: When we operated the .cn version of our search engine in China, it operated under the same principles and mechanisms that I have talked about here: namely, if we removed things it was because we knew of URLs and the removals were for that country version of the service. It was not something where Chinese law affected what came up on other versions of the search engines. For example, Chinese law would not have affected what was on the .uk search engine.

18

Q1446 Nadhim Zahawi: So why did you leave China? DJ Collins: We have not left China; we have a business there. I am sure no one is suggesting that we have a model in the UK akin to that in China. We set out the reason very clearly. We announced in January 2010 the exact reasons why we decided we could no longer self-censor our search results in China. One of the main reasons was that the internet restrictions in the country had dramatically increased. We launched our service in 2006 in all good faith because we believed that getting 95% of the information into the country would ultimately open up access to information. It turned out that was not true, and in 2010 we decided we could no longer do it. There was also an incident in which our own systems had been hacked from somewhere within China, and the combination of these events meant we felt we could no longer self-censor. It is a very different issue. That was a set of laws in China radically different from those applying to access to information in the UK. Q1447 Lord Gold: It is perfectly clear that your organisations are incredibly powerful. You have international reach. Although there are certain technical things you might not yet have developed, there is no doubt you can develop them very quickly. We have looked at whether or not you will remove material from sites voluntarily or because you are requested to do so. I am slightly troubled about whether the power you have could be abused in the future, in the sense that someone gets editorial control of one of your organisations and decides to take down material because it does not suit their political purposes. We have seen newspaper articles and heard today about Twitters ability to take down information in certain areas. What if someone had decided that all the Arab Spring stuff was not consistent with your policies and took it all down, and none of that material was available in the countries where it was circulated? That would be a terrible thing. We can all think of how my example could be taken several steps further. Indeed, someone could decide to start putting very bad material on the site. I am not sure how we get protection to deal with that. I wonder whether you can help me be assured that your companies will in future operate in an acceptable way. Do we need more law? Do we need more regulation? Lord Allan of Hallam: It is right to think about those issues. We operate as a service quite deliberately without exercising editorial control, so the content that is posted and shared on the site is created by the community of 800 million users around the world. We have a set of basic house rules that create good order on the service. Beyond that, we try to be as open as we can about what people can say. The closest analogy I can give would be something like a hotel, or a public space anyone can walk into but which still has private management around it. Our rules say things like you should not discriminate or use hate speech. They are broad things of good order. We ban nudity. You should not walk into a hotel nude; it is not acceptable, so we create a sense of good order and police that, but we do not try to police the individual conversations that people have in restaurants and bars within that public space. That is really where we feel comfortable as a platform that supports user-generated content. We are very transparent about where people cross the line. We have what we call our community standards, which explain exactly what kind of content would cross that line. Quite deliberately, we do not draw a distinction on things like political opinion and so on. That is the way we have chosen to establish a user-generated content platform, and it is very similar to most of them. I think that if anyone departed from that, they would not become a universally popular service. If they started interfering with editorial judgment on the kinds of platform we have, people would go elsewhere. Colin Crowell: Essentially, the issue you raise is one about which people who cherish freedom of expression would rightly be concerned. Twitter is a communications network; it is a neutral platform. We do not mediate the content of our users. In the policy we

19 announced last Thursday, our ability to withhold a tweet pursuant to an authorised entity requesting it comes with transparency built into the policy, in the sense we will seek to notify the user promptly that an authorised entity has requested that the tweet be withheld. We will also be transparent to other users in that jurisdiction, in the sense we will not surreptitiously delete it; rather, we will put up a grey box that says Content withheld so people can see that a tweet that had otherwise been served has been taken down. Finally, it is our practice to lodge these requests with an organisation called Chilling Effects, which will keep a log of the requests to which we respond in different jurisdictions so everyone can see how we are comporting ourselves with this policy and what has been withheld in different jurisdictions. Q1448 Chairman: Will this help you to respond speedily to injunctions that are issued in future? Colin Crowell: It allows us to deal with things on an in-country basis. Prior to that we had to deal with everything on a global basis. I do not pretend to know exactly how an injunction process would work in that we have never been formally served with an injunction, but the policy we announced was that, when we receive a request from an authorised entity, we will deal with it on a case-by-case basis going forward. Q1449 Lord Janvrin: Can you explain why there has been a major change of policy, and whether any issues linked to privacy affected that judgment? It is a major step. Colin Crowell: There is no magic to the timing of the announcement, and it was not made with any particular issue or country in mind. Rather, it goes to the natural evolutionary course of a company like ours, which started as a relatively small operation in San Francisco and then the service and brand became global. We are now starting to deploy people internationally. We have employees in London, Dublin and Tokyo, and as we move into those different jurisdictions and start to do business in those countries, as with the other companies that came before us in this space, we are trying to cater to the contours of freedom of expression as they may differ in different countries, because trying to deal with it by one ubiquitous policy from the United States is not going to work well in different countries. What is permissible in Germany is different from what is permissible here and in the United States. Q1450 Mr Bradshaw: I do not know how well acquainted you are with the case of Ryan Giggs in this country. He was a famous footballer who was identified by Twitter, although there was an injunction in force against disclosure of his identity. From what you say, it does not sound as if this new policy would have made a huge difference in a case like that. Colin Crowell: It is a hypothetical; I would not know how to answer that. I am not familiar with the details of it to know how to respond. Q1451 Mr Bradshaw: Take a theoretical case where a court injunction in this country says you cannot identify somebody in the public domain, and then someone tweets their identity in breach of that injunction. Are you saying that your new policy would enable you to stop that happening? Colin Crowell: A determination would be made about the applicability of that to services like ours. To the extent to which we receive from an authorised entity a request to take it down, then, consistent with the applicable law and our terms of service, we will work through it on a case-by-case basis.

20 Q1452 Mr Bradshaw: Newspapers here are made aware of injunctions as a matter of course. If Twitter were made aware of injunctions as a matter of course, you would know in advance; you would not need to receive a special notification. Colin Crowell: Presumably, we would need to receive notice from an authorised entity about the content. Q1453 Mr Bradshaw: If you got that from a UK court, do you think you could do something about it? Colin Crowell: Our policy, now that we have the ability to cater things to a particular jurisdiction, is to work through it on a case-by-case basis, with Twitter endeavouring to inform the user that it is sought to withhold the content, and with transparency to other users in the jurisdiction that the tweet has been withheld, but also with the knowledge that that content is available outside the jurisdiction. Q1454 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: I want to ask about the interface between your various businesses and the media in the sense of journalism. How much influence do you think information published online has? The Huffington Post has written us a letter saying that they are a member of the PCC. I know we have been rubbishing the PCC, but to what degree do you think that influence means you should be part of the regulatory process we are investigating? DJ Collins: I think there are two parts to that. First, what influence do these online publications have? I think it depends, just like it does with the offline media, on the brand. Clearly, The Guardian online has a huge global reach because people trust its content. I can think of others where they might not be quite so generous. As to where regulation starts and stops, all the examples you have given, including The Huffington Post, are essentially publishers of content, just like the Daily Mail, The Guardian or the Financial Times is a publisher. Google is a technical intermediary. On Web Search we help people find that content; we are not producing the content itself, so in any new regulation it is important to distinguish the two. Q1455 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: Lord Allan, I became very concerned by what happened in the Amanda Knox case and the use of Facebook images and so on. Presumably, your argument is that that is something for the publisher to regulate, as it were. Lord Allan of Hallam: Exactly. In terms of the PCC equivalent, which we were discussing last week, it is important to distinguish a regulator that regulates publications that are editorialised and have a huge influence over public debate because they reach millions of people with one piece of content, from the potential regulation of what millions of citizens say to one another. They are very different. When you are talking about regulating us, you are actually talking about regulating the people who post, because none of that content is ours. Again, that is a valid public policy debate about how far people should be regulated in respect of content that they post online. It is much more equivalent to thinking about how you would regulate them having a chat in the pub than it is about newspaper regulation, because online what they are doing most of the time is the equivalent of having a chat in the pub. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. It has been a lengthy and lively session. Thank you for your attendance. In particular, thank you, Mr Crowell, for flying in to see us today. Examination of Witnesses

21

Witnesses: Phil Hall, chairman, PHA Media and former editor of the News of the World and Hello! and Max Clifford, Max Clifford Associates Ltd, examined. Chairman: Mr Clifford and Mr Hall, welcome to the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions. Thank you very much for joining us today. Q1456 Lord Janvrin: May I ask a rather broad question about the development of legislation on privacy; the impact of the Human Rights Act 1998; how you view the interest in stories about celebrities carried in major British newspapers and the influence that has on what seems to be called the celebrity culture; and the number of stories that are or are not being carried. In other words, do you think the arguments about privacy have an impact on stories about celebrities and the way in which newspapers look at such stories? Max Clifford: The Leveson Inquiry has made a definite difference. Editors are frightened to come out with stories they would have put out before the Leveson Inquiry, so it has made a difference. Q1457 Lord Janvrin: What about further back? Phil Hall: I think there has been a real change in the attitude of newspaper editors towards A-list celebrities who can afford expensive lawyers. As a result, newspapers are very reluctant to engage with them. They will still do stories about them on occasion, but there is certainly greater reluctance. There has been a shift, particularly among the tabloid press, to more reality TV people who are enjoying fame at any cost and jump on that bandwagon. There has been a partnership of some kind between the newspapers and those people who are often celebrities for a very short period, but certainly there is less coverage of A-list celebrities as a result of it. Q1458 Lord Janvrin: I am thinking of the way in which the law relating to privacy has been evolving for a number of years. I absolutely take your point, Mr Clifford: the Leveson Inquiry has had an effect. I was thinking back over the previous 10 years or so. Max Clifford: Personally, I do not think it has made much difference to the big stars, because they have always had the money and PR people to protect them. Q1459 Nadhim Zahawi: Mr Clifford, in a Daily Mail article in December last year you were quoted as saying that the press is not free; it is shackled. Why do you believe the press is shackled? Max Clifford: I have said many timesI have written many articles about itthat you must have a free but responsible press. In the current climate a lot of journalists, particularly investigative reporters, are not doing what they should be doing because they are frightened of what emerged from News International. Their editors are considering whether readers will think they got these stories by methods they should not have used. To a degree that has happened over the last nine months to a year, or for as long as privacy and phone hacking has been in the public domain more and more. That is my main observation. Q1460 Nadhim Zahawi: Are you saying that the shackling is because the pendulum has swung too far the other way? Max Clifford: Yes. I think it has gone from one extreme to the other, and hopefully it will get back to a halfway house some time. Q1461 Nadhim Zahawi: You referred to investigative journalists. experience, in what way have they not been able to do their job properly? In your

22 Max Clifford: I think that in the current climate you would not know about MPs fiddling their expenses. There are lots of things like that that I think would not have come out in the current climate, because editors do not have the desire potentially to antagonise people in powerful positions in a way they would not have thought about two years ago. Q1462 Nadhim Zahawi: You think that no editor would have the gumption to pay for the CD of MPs expenses in todays climate? Max Clifford: It is not black and white, but it would be a lot more difficult to bring out a major expos on just about anything that involved anybody remotely powerful in the current climate. Q1463 Nadhim Zahawi: Even if it had a public interest? Max Clifford: Yes. Q1464 Nadhim Zahawi: Your feeling is that they shy away from it? Max Clifford: I think they would be far more cautious. There has definitely been a change. I am aware of many stories that would have made the front pages of the tabloid papers in the last six months but which have not appeared anywhere. Q1465 Lord Harries of Pentregarth: Are these private or public interest stories? Max Clifford: Both. Q1466 Nadhim Zahawi: So, really compelling public-interest stories that in your judgment the public have a real interest in reading about have been suppressed in the past six months? Max Clifford: Yes. Q1467 Nadhim Zahawi: Mr Hall, do you agree that the press has been shackled? Phil Hall: I do. In some of the areas where I used to workin the Sunday papers and, to a certain extent, the daily papersthe front pages are a lot safer. They follow live news stories rather than digging out their own. There is also a real issue about resources. All of them have been cut back to such an extent that, when the News of the World was closed recently, its staff was half the size I had only 10 years ago. When we had an investigative team we allowed it to work sometimes for four or five months on one story. They no longer have that luxury. Generally, the good public interest stories take a while to dig out, and as a result we are not getting those types of stories. Q1468 Nadhim Zahawi: But is that the result of the economic model or of what is happening currently? Phil Hall: I think it is a combination of both. If you have the luxury, as I did, of being able to sit on a great news story for two weeks while you check it again and againbecause I had the resources toyou are a lot braver and comfortable in running the big story. Now I think people are very wary of it. We are getting stories that are in the public interest but, because of the sheer amount of energy and effort that has to go into it, plus the risk of privacy actions and the PCC, which despite the criticisms has sharper teeth than it had when I was on it 10 years ago, things are being suppressed. Q1469 Penny Mordaunt: How much privacy do you think celebrities should expect to give up? For example, does it differ between those who proactively seek media attention

23 and those who decide that something should remain private? Does it depend on the type of celebrity, or how they try to brand themselves, or is it about the nature of the story? Phil Hall: This is the most difficult issue of all. To take Hello! Magazine, where people are coming into your homes and taking photographs, many newspapers say that if you pose for a spread of pictures in that magazine, you give up your right to privacy. I do not agree with that. Life moves on and changes. Just because you are happy at one moment of your life and you feel that want to celebrate it by sharing it with people who perhaps are following your career, I do not think it means that three years later, when something shocking happens to you, every detail of that incident should be reported. For instance, in Germany that is the way it works. I have a German client who says that in Germany she has never done interviews about her private life because once you do so it is open season. If you do not do it they cannot even take a picture of you in a public place. I think it is very hard to get that right. When you become a big-time celebrity there is a certain responsibility, because fame brings you reward that is beyond most peoples imagination; I think in most cases that brings a responsibility. But it is very hard to marshal a set of rules to govern what is right and wrong in that area. Q1470 Penny Mordaunt: Do you want to add to that, Mr Clifford? Max Clifford: You have to look at every situation on its own merits. A celebrity or a star who uses every means to promote themselves and their private lives to the public as part of their careersomeone like Katie Pricedoes not deserve the same protection as a star who generally tries to keep his or her private life out of the media. I have been promoting stars since the early 1960s. Most of them desperately try to keep their private lives private. You look at every situation on its own merits, but my basis is that someone who craves publicity and brings the media into every aspect of their private life to promote themselves, make money and be a success does not deserve the same protection as someone who is the total opposite. Q1471 Penny Mordaunt: Would you elaborate on that? Is the attitude that if you play with fire you are bound to get burnt? Is it that the person has created an appetite among the public, or is it that somehow it is more justifiable to an editor? Max Clifford: It is very simple. Whether its the Beatles, Sinatra, Muhammed Ali, Marlon Brando or Simon Cowell, or anybody I have ever worked with, I make it very clear to them that if they use the media they cannot complain too much when they use them. It is a two-way street. Q1472 Penny Mordaunt: I want to raise an issue that came up in a previous meeting of the Committee on attitudes towards celebrities children. In your current and former careers you may have encountered situations where you felt that a celebrity was perhaps not acting in the best interests of their child. It is perhaps not something you would want your children to be involved in or do. Do you currently advise people against particular things that they want to do using their children for publicity? Phil Hall: Absolutely. Q1473 Penny Mordaunt: Within your existing companies or the publications you have worked for previously do you have codes of conduct on that issue? Phil Hall: Almost 100% of the time I advise people not to get involved with their children, but it is very difficult. A year or so ago there was a famous case involving Wayne Rooney. When his team won the premiership he walked across the pitch with his children and enjoyed celebrating, as every other player did with their children. It is then very hard to

24 say he has forfeited his right to privacy. That was what happened, because when he tried to prevent pictures of the child being used at a later time the argument was, Well, you were perfectly happy to parade him in front of 100,000 people at Old Trafford. Why cant we now use pictures in this particular newspaper? People still must be allowed a choice even when they are celebrities. It is one thing to have a family day when everybody is joining in; it is another thing when there are specific pictures of a child in a particular circumstance. Celebrities are criticised for hiring PRs like Max or me, because for a large percentage of the time they are looking to protect children. When I represented Sir Fred Goodwin, for instance, it was about looking after his children who were being pursued and photographed, and they were followed to school. Very often the issue is children. Q1474 Penny Mordaunt: Whether it is statutory or regulatory, do you think there should be more clarity about what can and cannot be done in those circumstances? Phil Hall: I do not know the answer. People have to take responsibility; editors have to take responsibility. It concerns me to see the Max Mosley case. He was a client. An award of 60,000 damages for that footage being shown around the world means that the risk is very low for newspapers. If they really want to do something there is not much to stop them. Somewhere somebody has to take responsibility for making those decisions. When people talk about sources in newspapers, editors must know who they are. You have to know. If you allow any human being to write a story referring to a source, how do you know it is real and not made up? In my time I remember Piers Morgan doing it often. Somebody would say, Give me a story and talk about a source. Piers would say, I need to speak to that source. Were going to ring them up and have a conversation with them. Personal responsibility is very important. I am sorry I have gone off the subject slightly. You asked whether you can have a statute to protect children. I think it is very difficult. Otherwise, you would have a picture of the Manchester United team at Old Trafford and you would have to pixelate every childs face. That is plainly ridiculous because the parents choose that as a family situation. I think that editors have to make choices. Those choices are often made willingly but sometimes they are made in conjunction with the Press Complaints Commission. Q1475 Baroness Corston: We have had evidence to the effect that if a child is used for a photograph on a football pitch, or in OK! or Hello! magazine in a family context, the right to privacy is relinquished because the children have been commoditised. Are both of you saying you disagree with that? Phil Hall: I disagree with it because circumstances can change. Think of an extreme case where somebody is on a football pitch with their children and photographs are taken, and then the couple are getting divorced in acrimonious circumstances and the children are going into court for a custody hearing. I do not think that because they appeared in photographs at a football match they should lose all their right to privacy in a difficult emotional situation. Certainly, you have to be very careful about intruding into grief. As a newspaper editor, I have spoken to people who are grieving and they are happy for photographs to be taken. It is very hard to put these things into statute. People have to make personal decisions and be responsible for them as editors or journalists. Max Clifford: To me, it is very simple. Children deserve maximum protection, and they are not old enough to decide whether or not they appear in papers or magazines. In a situation where someone has just won a major football match or tennis tournament and their child is there, it is a happy picture and one that everybody enjoys. I do not think necessarily that Wayne Rooney, or whoever it is, should then face the argument, Well, you were happy

25 to have their picture in the paper then. Therefore, we have free range to do what we want. To me, that is totally wrong. Q1476 Lord Dobbs: It is very interesting that so much of what you have already said today is about protection, whereas your reputations have been established on promoting individuals. I remember 20 years ago Max and I appeared on a chat showwhere we discussed issues about the protection of your clients. How much of your work is keeping things out of the newspapers rather than putting them in? Max Clifford: When I started out in the 1960s it was probably 80% to 90% promotion and 10% protection. The first thing I ever stopped was a story involving one of the stars of Tamla Motown, which we launched in this country. He was having an affair with one of the girls in my press office, so I stopped it coming out. That was a rarity. In the last 20 years it has probably become by far the biggest part of my business not just for stars but companies and organisations I work with all over the world, the chairmen of companies, et cetera. Whereas for the first 20 years of my business the emphasis was on promotion, by far the biggest part now is protecting people from the excesses of the media and the individuals. Q1477 Lord Dobbs: Mr Hall, what would be your experience? Phil Hall: I think I am more 50/50, but I run a different type of business from Max. It is reputation management, whether it is an individual or a company. We are more involved with companies. Equally, it is a huge part of the work. I was interested to hear the previous witnesses. Google and Twitter are far more dangerous to my clients than newspapers. I have had clients blackmailed on Twitter and pursued around the world on Google. A company was paying an individual to attack a travel company with false pictures and information. They were really going after them by way of industrial espionage, which you can never do in a newspaper because of libel, slander and editorial judgment. You have free rein that is completely unpoliced. If you make one mistake in your life, it is now there forever; you can never move on. The biggest thing for me is people walking in saying, I made a mistake. I had one guy who said, I made a mistake and went to prison for one week 25 years ago, and every day of his life that has been at the top of Google because it was covered by the national newspapers. He cannot move on. Reputational management is not just in Maxs world of big-name celebrities; it now affects every walk of life. Q1478 Lord Dobbs: How do you go about protecting reputations? Mr Clifford, I remember listening to you some time ago saying you can do deals with newspapers. There is a story you want to keep out. They might swap it for a story you have that you are happy to give them. Max Clifford: The biggest form of protection is anticipation. If you know what is going on, hopefully you can stop anybody else finding out. The most important part of my work over the last 45 or 46 years is anticipation. Beyond that, you do what you can. It is like a game of chess. Every situation is different. You are in the middle of 12 chessboards every day and you move accordingly. If someone is about to break a major story on one of my clients which will be damaging, I will do what I can to try to stop that story, but hopefully I would have stopped it ever coming to his attention because I knew what was going on and prevented anybody else from finding out. Q1479 Lord Dobbs: How frequently do you do information swaps, for example, Mr Editor, Ill do a deal with you. Ill give you something if you go easy on this other story? Is that commonplace?

26 Phil Hall: I have not done that. I do not get stories; it is not what we do. There are four or five ways of doing it. One is to investigate the investigator. I often find that people come along with completely false premises, or an exaggerated story. We will examine the allegations and come back with documentary evidence. When I was editing, Max used to do that to me regularly. You would come back with the true story and prove that your great scoop is not a great scoop after all. Second, you take the legal route if it is justifiable. But generally if the story is in the public interest it is difficult. You double the jeopardy if you are trying to take legal action when something is true and a reporter has it. They will come after you over and over again if you try to mislead. It is a matter of trying to find the truth of the story and to undo it, as it were, and having a relationship with editors where you can have an honest conversation with them. I have to tell you that, despite what people think, the Press Complaints Commission has been very effective. Recently, we had an example of a celebrity in a park. The persons nanny was in the park having an argument with a child. The photographer got a picture of this particular incident and a newspaper decided to run it. One phone call to the Press Complaints Commission and the story was stopped. They will act as an arbiter. For me, the biggest problem, as in Max Mosleys case, is not getting proper advance notice that something is happening. I have a slightly different view on privacy injunctions. I think that to an extent they were working. At the beginning it was crazy, but judges started to change the rules and say, You must give proper notice to each side, so effectively you had a newspaper saying, This story is in the public interest, and the individual saying, No, its not, and at last there was somebody in the middle saying, I will now give you a ruling on whether or not I think it is fair. To a certain extent it is moving forward. There are different ways of stopping stories. Q1480 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: Lord Dobbs mentioned that he had appeared on a chat show with you, Mr Clifford. To a certain extent you have made a living out of celebrities, and I suggest that you are a celebrity in your own right. Kelvin MacKenzie said the other day that he felt in some way intruded upon. Have you ever found yourself at the end of an attempt by, say, Mr Hall to look into your life, and what was your reaction to that? Max Clifford: My reaction to that is basically the way I have lived my life. I would take care of myself. If I am up to no good and somebody is about to find out, I would do everything I can to make sure they do not find out. Q1481 Baroness Bonham Carter of Yarnbury: I expected that answer. Do you think that the laws we have are good enough to protect those who are not Max Clifford? Max Clifford: No. Q1482 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: Did your relationship with editors mean that it was respected? Phil Hall: One thing editors do make a judgment call about is whether a story is proportionate and justifiable. If you have a bad story about Max one thing you can look at is a trail of charity work, good will and stuff he has done over the years. That happens all the time. People say that so-and-so has done such-and-such a terrible thing, and you say that it is one little mistake in their life. The stories that newspapers run tend to be when people are trying to portray themselves as something they are not. The public interest kicks in when a particular football star is saying he wants a million-pound contract because he is whiter than white and actually he is not.

27 Q1483 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: You are saying it is a bartering system? Phil Hall: There is, because it is a judgment call. There is no statutory detail about what you and cannot do. Q1484 Lord Gold: Mr Hall, I want to go back to your comment about your clients being pursued by the social media groups. Obviously, you will have raised with them your concerns. How responsive were they? Did they care? Did they do anything? Phil Hall: It was very difficult. You write in and do not get a reply. You can now use what is called a John Doe order. Lawyers can go to court and get an internet provider to reveal names so you know who has put it out there, but it is very difficult. In one case I remember a person was posting photographs and reviews on TripAdvisor day after day against my client; they referred to rat-infested hotel rooms that did not exist. He moved around and eventually he was tracked down in Brazil. He was deliberately paid by a competitor to damage a competitors business, and damage it did; it was very effective. Q1485 Lord Gold: Is it the case that without some sort of court order there would be no interest? Phil Hall: It is very difficult unless a lawyer gets involved. With a lawyer, it has more purchase and appeal, but very often without a court order it is almost impossible to get them to listen. They constantly argue and claim freedom of speech which I say is criminal activity. Someone was literally blackmailed on Twitter; they started dropping little messages like, Unless you make contact with me Im going to reveal a secret about you. It is incredible how easy it is to do. Q1486 Mr Bradshaw: I return to the contention both of you made earlier that phone hacking and the Leveson Inquiry has had a chilling effect on genuine stories that were in the public interest. Phil, you said that you think the privacy law is working quite well. There is a strong public interest defence if you are accused of invading someones privacy. You seem to be suggesting that either the newspapers do not understand that or they are confusing what is in the public interest with what the public may be interested in, i.e. gossip and tittle-tattle. Phil Hall: I think it is the process. In my time we had the resources so we were able to get two or three reporters on a particular story. The public interest stories are always the more complicated ones, because inevitably the danger to the person you are exposing is great. You know that you have to get very substantial evidence. During my editorship we jailed 110 people because we had a team doing nothing else. We were constantly threatened with legal action, and not one worked against us. The public interest stories were very hard to expose. If you are an editor and you have a newspaper to get out every day, or every Sunday, you now have a choice. Some things will take a lot of effort because of the various privacy actions and confidentiality. We have had a lot of problems with people saying, Can I have a confidentiality agreement with a particular party? Therefore, they can close down the story. I remember one story about a banker who was involved in a huge amount of fraud. The person exposing him was a prostitute. He claimed that by right a man had a confidential agreement with a prostitute and won, and he injuncted the paper and stopped the story running. All around there are constant actions that people are not aware of which make it more difficult. I think that as a result editors take the easy route. Paul Dacre will stick out his neck and do investigations like that into the Stephen Lawrence case, but they are few and far between, are they not?

28 Q1487 Paul Farrelly: Mr Hall, I want to go back to your example of the Press Complaints Commission heading something off rather than being just a body dealing with complaints after the event. Would you agree that the case you have cited is rather different in scale and magnitude from Max Mosleys? My experience of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee is that if you have a big story such as Max Mosley or the McCanns, where it was dog eat dog and you would be crushed in the stampede, the Press Complaints Commission would not dare to dip a toe in. Phil Hall: It was different in my time. My personal experience of the Press Complaints Commission is that in the last five or six years when I have been working in PR it has worked almost 100% of the time. When we have a case involving intrusion or which is factually incorrect, often it helps you to buy time to be able to go to them and say, Please ask the editor to wait while we come up with the evidence and produce the retort to the story they want to run in the newspaper the following day. To me, they have been very helpful. As has been said before, they have never been a regulatory body but a watchdog, and that is as far as it ever went, but it was at least a conciliation service you could go to and have a conversation, because an awful lot of people cannot afford to go the legal route. Q1488 Paul Farrelly: Mr Clifford, what would you say about the bravery or timidity of the Press Complaints Commission? Max Clifford: To me, the Press Complaints Commission has never existed; I have never known them help anybody. When Robert Murat came to me because he was being destroyed by the British media over the disappearance of Madeleine McCannit went on for weeks and weeksthe Press Complaints Commission was not remotely interested; it had nothing to do with it and did not want to know. I got involved and found out that all kinds of things were being written because he had been given that arguido status. His mother was on the phone to me in tears; his aunt was almost suicidal, as was he. We rapidly discovered that it was all a load of lies created purely because it sold newspapers. The man was being totally destroyed. I was not paid for it, but I got involved. We got apologies from all of the newspapers and several hundred thousand pounds worth of compensation. There were would-be front-page stories saying, The police have seized his computer and there are images of child pornography on it. It was totally untrue. They had his computer weeks before but there was nothing on it. The man was being absolutely destroyed by the British media with no truth in it. The Press Complaints Commission was nowhere to be seen. I can give you 50 examples of things like that in which I have been involved over the last 20 to 30 years. They are not independent; they are paid for by the media and they look after the mediaend of story. A member of the public or anybody else has no chance at all. Q1489 Paul Farrelly: Mr Hall was just talking about the 100-plus people who were jailed through your diligence when you were the editor of the News of the World. Mr Clifford, do you think that in the halcyon days before 2000 the reporters on the tabloids, such as the News of the World, were more decent, upstanding and respectful of the Editors Code of Practice than they have been since? Max Clifford: No. It has become ever more competitive. As Phil was saying, staff has been cut; fewer people have more to do; there is no back-up and support. They have to get results quickly; otherwise, someone else will be brought in. It has become ever more difficult particularly for tabloid journalists. It has always been based on circulation, which you totally understand. It is a very competitive world and business. Everybodys circulation is shrinking, so the big stories are a huge source of success in major newspapers, and competition has become fiercer and fiercer. It has changed slightly, but when I started in the

29 1960s the big exclusives and scoops were the most important thing to most journalists, certainly those on tabloid newspapers, and they still are. Q1490 Paul Farrelly: Mr Clifford, you said earlier you hoped that, after the Leveson Inquiry and the phone hacking investigations, the landscape would settle down to a halfway house. People might have said that the landscape settled down after the Calcutt report, and here we are again. How would both of you describe the ideal halfway house in terms of stories in the public interest? Max Clifford: These days, for every story I break there are six I try to stop. It has been like that for many years. You need to find a halfway house between public interest and everybodys right to privacy, not just the rich and famous who get more than enough protection. I know because I am part of it. Ordinary members of the public have no chance. Super-injunctions do not exist for ordinary members of the public; they do not have the money or ability to get them. Therefore, it is a law purely for rich, powerful people, which in a democracy is wrong. In a democracy you must have a free press but also a responsible and accountable press and you must have a situation where every ordinary man and woman has someone to stand up for them. Right now they have no one. Phil Hall: You must have a halfway house between the press and public. I cannot think of any alternative to that. I do not believe that you can have a statutory system that is fair or proper because there are so many different circumstances. We need a Press Complaints Commission with more teeth. I share Maxs frustration with some of the great cases like Murat. Unless you get to the Press Complaints Commission quickly before something happens, it is very hard to stop a story, particularly one as huge as that one. It was appalling, the way that man was treated. Max Clifford: If an ordinary member of the public is thrown suddenly into the spotlight the Press Complaints Commission could contact them and make them aware of it, saying, This is whats happening. Do you want our professional advice, guidance and help? before they are destroyed. Once they are destroyed, that is it; for the rest of their lives they are labelled. Q1491 Eric Joyce: On the subject of injunctions, we had evidence from Google, Facebook and Twitter earlier. If someone has failed to come to you in the first place, and they have been exposed, literally or figuratively, on the internet, or it has gone to the newspapers perhaps there has been an injunction, or notand is on several hundred web pages, is the game over at that point? Max Clifford: I do not have the same worries as the people who were here before. To me, it does not have the same credibility. Anybody can write anything on Twitter about this or that, and the vast majority of it is absolute nonsense, so it has no credibility, strength or depth. It is a wholly different matter if it is on the front page of a national newspaper or whatever. The vast majority of people either believe it or are influenced by it. In terms of what is achieved, the national press is far more powerful, certainly in the world I am in the middle of, than Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, for that very reason. This is someones view or opinion, and you take it as that and nothing more. Q1492 Eric Joyce: In the case of Max Mosley it is not an opinion but images. Max Clifford: Max Mosley is a good example. The women involved in entertaining Max Mosley came to me and said, We admit what we did but there was no Nazi orgy; we didnt dress up and do this and that, and now the paper is telling us that, unless we sign a statement to say that, we will be exposed in the paper. I had a word with the editor and it never came out.

30

Q1493 Chairman: Mr Clifford, to come back to the point that you made earlierMr Hall agreedthat there had been a chilling effect. You want to try to get it back to some kind of equilibrium. Would it help if Parliament were to spell out what it thought was the public interest so there was a democratic statement which would help editors and provide them with the necessary facts to go ahead and publish? Max Clifford: That is the most difficult part of all of this. What is in the public interest? Of the hundreds of stories I have broken, probably 20% you could say were in the public interest, but everybody has a different view on it. In discussions I have had when talking at universities, on chat shows, et cetera, if you ask two people what is in the public interest you will get totally different views. I am sure it is the same with parliamentarians. To me, it was in the public interest that we knew about David Mellor and John Major, but it was not in the public interest that I knew about several other politicians who were also having affairs because they were not lecturing us about family values. David Mellor and John Major were. Q1494 Chairman: Mr Hall, do you agree with that? Phil Hall: 70% of people who appear in a newspaper would rather not be there. It is very hard almost to impose a public interest because you are caught up in a particular situation. It is really hard to legislate. There are so many different circumstances. When I was editing, we had a committee of 10 who day after day sat and argued until we were blue in the face about whether something was in the public interest. There were constant arguments about whether it was or was not. I cannot believe that legislation can be foolproof and work in all situations. I disagree with Max in relation to Twitter and Google. This morning we had a case involving an international investor. A story appeared in a newspaper that was partly correct and partly wrong. In this case it was the Daily Mail and it had a big influence, but it is on Google forever. It haunts him constantly. At every business deal he tries to do he is asked whether he was the person who did not pay the rent on a particular property. He has to try to justify himself day after day, whereas in normal walks of life people make mistakes and they can move on. It may be a different type of influence from a newspaper story, but it is significant and is growing. As newspaper circulations fall and the internet gets a greater following, the emphasis of power will change. Max Clifford: If I say this on Twitter and it is wrong then you as a PR, or whoever, can put it right in the press. If it is on there and it is wrong it will be embarrassing and damaging to the credibility of Facebook or Twitter or whoever. Phil Hall: What if it is right and you are being blackmailed over something that is true? You cannot be blackmailed if it is not true. But that does not mean it is right for it to be made public. Not so long ago I had somebody being blackmailed on Twitter. I think it is wrong; it is very damaging. Max Clifford: Of course; there is no justification for that. Q1495 Mr Bradshaw: Mr Clifford, you said earlier that the current system went some way to protect the rich and powerful, but not the ordinary person. You mentioned your client Mr Murat who was so badly treated over the Madeleine McCann case. You also came up with a suggestion of how the system could be improved, in that whatever replaces the Press Complaints Commission should go proactively to people like that. Can you elaborate on your vision of how a better system could work? Max Clifford: You must have a press complaints body that is totally independent and is not in the pockets or hands of Fleet Street. It is difficult to come up with a committee of people, but you must have a situation where, before they come out with a major story or

31 revelation, the editor of a national newspaper has to go to that body and say, This is what we have, and this is how we got it. Is it justified? No other paper can have that exclusive. If they say yes, you have it, and if they say no, you havent. Obviously, it is far more complicated than that, but if you have a body that is made up of people who understand particularly the tabloid reader in this country, is prepared to stand up, is independent and not in the pockets of a publisher or anybody else, you have taken a step in the right direction. An ordinary member of the public who is suddenly approached by a newspaper that is about to write a major about them, which potentially could be very damaging, should have a body they can contact. Years ago a woman in Scotland came to see me. Her daughter had been killed by a steel cone in a tragic playground accident. The family was devastated and did not want to talk to anybody. The local papers followed the younger son to school and put some quotes in the paper. The lad committed suicide two days later. He did not speak to anybody. That lady told me that 10 years ago, and I have never forgotten it. Loads of things like that are going on. The British public desperately need real protection from the excesses of the media. The rich, powerful and famous have more than enough protection. Q1496 Mr Bradshaw: Do the powers and sanctions of this new body need statutory underpinning in your view? Max Clifford: They need to have as much control as possible. Is it possible to come up with something that is perfect? It is not, but in a democracy we do not have any body to protect ordinary people, and we should have. It should be proactive. You should not have to wait for someone to fill in 10 forms because then it is too late; it is already all over the papers. I also think that apologies in newspapers should be proportionate to the article. If you have a front page spread on someone and it is shown to be untrue and wrong, put the apology on the front page. Q1497 Chairman: Mr Hall, you have been an editor, and presumably you resisted putting apologies on the front page in a proportionate size. Now you are on the other side, how are you faring? Phil Hall: You may not believe this, but in five years as editor of the News of the World I did not get sued successfully once. That was the last chance saloon era and, from what I can remember, we were certainly putting in apologies prominently. But you are right that editors are reluctant to do that. They will try to say to a particular individual, We will pay you more money if the apology is smaller. Some people give in to that and would rather have the compensation than the apology. I agree with Max that the apology should be equal. There is difficulty in finding an independent body if it is politically appointed or part of the judiciary. The other difficulty is an independent body understanding the importance of the media. We do not want somebody saying, I would prefer that story not to be in the paper, and everything is crossed, because you will struggle to approach everything. Max is right. People are in the eye of storm, as was the case in a murder trial in the west country not so long ago. You also have to understand what is going on. The police often inform newspapers because they are looking for publicity, clues and help. I think Mr Murat was a victim of that as much as excessive treatment by newspapers. I think there are other factors. Q1498 Lord Gold: Mr Hall, you said you did not agree with Max Clifford, but what would you do to help protect the large number of people who cannot afford to go to law? Phil Hall: I agree with Max about being more proactive. That is a great tenet with which to start. One of the issues about the Press Complaints Commission is that because people complain to it, and by definition do not want to be identified, the PCC does very little to raise its profile. It should be out there telling people what it does; otherwise, people do not

32 know how it operates. It should be independent and taken away from editorial influence, although you still need editorial expertise to understand how the press works. There should be fines imposed on newspapers, but somehow we must have personal responsibility. All the time I hear journalists say, My sources tell me. I say, Theres no way they can be telling you that because it is categorically untrue. I had a story about a celebrity; the headline that appeared in a newspaper was Celebrity throws mother out of her house. The mother was homeless. The celebrity gave her a house they had bought for an investment on the condition that the mother would help renovate it and then they would share the profits, but the headline was Celebrity kicks mother out of house. When we provided the paperwork and the mother provided an affidavit they still ran the story. There must be some personal responsibility, because at the moment journalists can hide behind the fact that the editor or company will pay the bill. Somehow we have to make people personally responsible for what they do. Q1499 Lord Gold: How would you deal with those publications that do not join the PCC? Would you introduce similar regulation for social media? Phil Hall: That is really interesting. The social media at the moment seem to be able to do what they want and hide behind free speech. There must be some policing, because at the moment there is one law for the print media and no law for the social networking groups. People have to sign up to that. If not, I do not think they should be allowed to operate as a business. You cannot freewheel when you are ruining peoples lives. Q1500 Lord Dobbs: We have had editor after editor coming here to say that the fundamental principle that drives them is freedom of expression. That lies at the basis of all their operations. Even when they make mistakes, it is usually justified because that principle is so fundamental that nothing must be done to undermine it. You have practical experience of these people; indeed, Phil Hall was one. Can you comment on whether they are being entirely genuine with us? Phil Hall: Clearly, they are protecting their commercial interests. I talked about this earlier; one of my bugbears is when people talk to me about their sources. I believe that newspapers have the right to protect their sources because whistleblowers, as we like to call them, will not come forward and expose wrongdoing if it will ruin their lives because they work in that sector, or because they are potentially shutting down a company that is producing drugs that harm people but it will cost people jobs. You have to have protection for whistleblowers, but it should be possible somehow to go to a central body when newspapers are running stories with malicious intent, and they know they do not have the full evidence; or they are not sure of the source and they are guessing and, as Kelvin MacKenzie would say, lobbing it in anyway. I do not think that is acceptable. Certainly, old-fashioned reporters had sources that existed that they could name to their editor. The editor would often ring them and, if necessary, when push came to shove in the legal courts, you were in a position where somebody would support you. That is still important to me. Q1501 Lord Dobbs: Mr Clifford, are editors men of high principle in these dealings? Max Clifford: I am sure that editors are good, bad and indifferent, the same as everybody in this room. But the most important thing to any editor is success in circulation. They are the only ones who know how moral they are in judging what goes in their paper, but what matters is that they are successful in any area. The same goes for the news editor and features editor. Success is what it is all about. Competition becomes ever more fierce. My belief is that for them the most important thing is commercial success, and hopefully they are all very moral, God-fearing and respectable people who would take that into account at all times.

33 Phil Hall: The newspaper industry has changed forever, and I do not think it will ever go back to some of the excesses we have seen in recent years. I really do not think that it will level back once all the attention goes off it. I think people have changed significantly. Certainly, from conversations I have had with editors and features editors, these days when you say something to them about public interest, instead of having an argument about whether something is truthful they are very quick to take on board the argument. Q1502 Eric Joyce: Phil, I want to go back to your earlier remark about policing the internet. It must be a source of frustration for people who work with print media. There are so many posts, comments and blogs; there are billions of transactions. Max Mosley has been discussed here frequently, so I raise it again. When you get to the point where something is circulated to an enormous degree, the game is simply a bogey. To try to get it back is not really a point of principle, because it requires a degree of censorship that might have other impacts and unforeseen consequences. Phil Hall: I concur with what Max said. It is difficult when the newspapers start a story and it appears on the internet. Given the way search engine optimisation works, it is very hard to pull it down, but stories appear in smaller circulation and publications. We are always concentrating on Max Mosley, but we forget that every day there are situations involving ordinary people that might never make a newspaper. They now make the internet and have an impact on those peoples lives. I still believe that you can go back and attack particularly the more prevalent stories that are harder to move. There are companies constantly churning information to make sure there are new stories at the top of Google and other search engines so the damaging stories are not there. But when they have appeared in a particularly big circulation, or on the BBC website, it is harder to move them. I do not think two wrongs make a right. When Max Mosley went to court two days afterwards and said, I invoke my privacy, he was told it was too late; it was all over the internet. I do not understand how two wrongs can make a right. Q1503 Eric Joyce: When he came to give evidence he was quite articulate on that point. Many people say that if something has been tweeted 60,000 or 70,000 times it is the same as being on the front page of a newspaper. As Max said earlier, it is not the same at all. But once it has been out there five or 10 million times they accepted that the dam had burst. They made that significant distinction. Phil Hall: Yes, they did. Q1504 Mr Buckland: I want to look at a particular aspect that concerns a lot of us: the role of the less reputable agencies, shall we say, which get hold of stories through illegitimate means and sell them on to newspapers. Let us assume that the Press Complaints Commission is reformed. Do you think that it should have a wider role in policing and monitoring the activities of some of those organisations, as well as the newspapers themselves? Phil Hall: I do not believe that is true. When I was an editor there must have been 70 or 80 big news agencies around the country; now there are 20. That is a huge loss to the industry, because weve lost the guy on the ground who lived in Truro, Cornwall, and knew his beat and local people filed accurate stories. We now have a society where people see opportunities and contact agencies to try to sell their stories because they are a friend of somebody who has been on Big Brother, or whatever. In my experience those new agencies are not as prevalent as they used to be, but you are right that suppliers to the industry should be signed up to the same code of conduct and principles and standards. I have said many times that one of the biggest issues for privacy is paparazzi. I do not know how you license

34 them, but even private detectives are not licensed in this country. They are licensed in America. We used to talk about this in connection with Princess Diana. Max would be on to me saying, You are the editor; stop it. I admit I said, Max, there are 15 other editors running this picture. I cant not run it. Why are the police not arresting them when 15 photographers are chasing somebody down the street, harassing people and causing dangerous driving? It cannot just be the media; I think the authorities have a role. Max Clifford: That is the whole point of it. It is not just Fleet Street; it is everybody connected with it. There needs to be a body that takes control and appreciates that in a democracy we must have a free press, but can control the excesses and that kind of undercover stuff. Phil Hall: You need a body that is proactive. Max Clifford: Members of the public come to me every day because there is nowhere else for them to go, and they cannot afford lawyers. Sometimes you can help them. I am aware of the need that is out there, whether it is the press agencies, journalists or whatever. They are dealing with very professional people and are part of big organisations. They do not have a clue, and there is no one there for them. If one good thing comes out of this, I would love to see a truly independent press complaints body that is there for the British public, that the British public knows how to contact and can do so before anybody destroys them in the papers. Q1505 Paul Farrelly: Recently, The Independent ran a freelance investigation into Lord Bells public relations company. One thing that did not come out of it was any hint that primarily a financial PR company was being paid by both sides. To what extent is it usual in your parts of the business to be paid not only by clients but also by retainers, or for stories by newspapers? How do you manage the potential conflicts in that situation? Phil Hall: Do you mean representing a newspaper from a PR perspective? Q1506 Paul Farrelly: No. When you are brokering stories, or trying to keep them out of the papers, clients pay you directly, but in some circumstances agents have a retainer, or are paid by both sides. I am just wondering how you manage that potential conflict in certain circumstances, or are you telling me it does not happen? Max Clifford: You try to have as much influence and control as you can from all aspects. If you are retained by a major company and suddenly something happens which will be damaging to them, someone will come to you for the sake of conversation. I have these situations every week. Someone comes to me with something which would be damaging to a company, organisation or star I represent. I will try to find a solution and come out with something that not only stops the damage to the client but is also beneficial to the person coming to me in the first place. I can give you dozens of examples of that. Often, what is most important to them is not getting a damaging article in the paper but doing something which the organisation, company or whatever is stopping them achieving. You can hopefully make that happen, so it is a matter of trying to find the best possible solution so everybody wins. That is public relations in 2012. Phil Hall: We work with a lot of hedge funds and different financial institutions. From our point of view there are people trying to leak stories against them and we have to try to turn them around. Maybe our story is better than the one they are being offered. That is the trade-off that was talked about earlier. If we have an announcement that we might be holding back for a month or two, but we think it will make a bigger headline than the negative one they are trying to perpetrate we will put it out there and then, but we are very careful about conflicts of interest. Occasionally, we are asked to act on both sides of the argument. I

35 was asked by two people on a Panorama programme who were against each other. Clearly, you cannot represent both of them. Max Clifford: Sometimes you can represent opposite sides and get a result that benefits both, and you as well. Q1507 Paul Farrelly: Getting back to the central issue before this Committee privacy and injunctionsquite frankly, I am more interested in confidence. I would not have become involved with John Terry or Rio Ferdinand, but there was a good public interest reason for me to tackle the injunction in the Trafigura case, which I did. The cry freedom of expression is supported by many people with a cry for open justice: that justice should, as far as possible, be seen to be open. In what circumstances outside child protection and tipping offSienna Miller had an interesting variant in her phone hacking case, trying to stop tipping off because she did not want News International to know she was going for disclosuredo you think anonymity should be allowed in legal proceedings affecting the press? Phil Hall: When there is a high-profile individual in the centre of a media storm it seems that anybody connected with them becomes fair game to the newspapers: mothers, fathers, brothers, uncles and former school chums. It is very difficult. It is not the one story that becomes the issue; it is a plethora of stories over a long period of time. It is very hard to justify that. I do not know how you can have any legislation that stops it. In the end, you must have personal responsibility for it. It is very difficult to identify specifics. I have had clients whose entire families have been shredded by the media because of a mistake made by an individual. That is very hard. Let us say it is an uncle who has done wrong. People say, Well, that individual is connected to the family, and therefore it is right to expose the wrongdoing. They would not be exposing that wrongdoing on the front page of a national newspaper unless it were connected to a celebrity. I do not think that is a justifiable public interest defence when people are writing stories. Anyone connected to a high-profile celebrity gets dragged into the media storm as much as the person at the centre of it. Q1508 Paul Farrelly: Max, do we need to leave it to judges rather than legislation to look at the individual circumstances such as those Mr Hall just talked about where whole families are shredded? Max Clifford: Every situation has to be looked at on its own merits. In the case of Ryan Giggs, to me what was wonderful about it was that when Imogen Thomas came to me she said, I am frightened that the Sun will break the story about my relationship with Ryan Giggs. I dont want it to come out. Can you help me? I checked with the editor of the Sun and found they did not have enough for it to stand up. She said, What do I do? I said, You just keep your head down and keep away from Ryan Giggs and it wont come out, but phone him to warn him. That was what she did. He then went to law. His lawyers took out an injunction and they named her. So much for her trying to protect his and her privacy. And fortunately, the super-injunction backfired and more people knew about it than probably would have done otherwise. You look at every situation on its own merits, but I hope that the big step forward out of this is that one day we have a proactive press complaints body that will take control, because that is good for the press as well as the public. Q1509 Mr Bradshaw: Given your experience and expertise, would you be prepared to serve on such a body? Phil Hall: He needs to be the chairman of it. Max Clifford: Let me put it like this: I am now 68 and I cannot keep on much longer. There might well come a time. I enjoy those kinds of things. I love it when ordinary

36 members of the public come to me, and sometimes I can help. It gives me huge satisfaction. I suppose that, as far as possible, I am independent, if you see what I mean. Q1510 Mr Bradshaw: It sounds like a job application. Max Clifford: No, no. I have never applied for a job in my life, and I am not about to start now. Chairman: That is awfully close to a yes. Thank you very much indeed for appearing before us.