Grants and Contributions

This research will focus on analysing mobile gaming apps and comparing them to COPPA compliance criteria in order to identify good and bad practices in children’s privacy related to gaming and to produce public awareness materials.

The research will evaluate PIPEDA and proposed Canadian privacy and AI legislation for their fitness to govern the use of Emotional AI used with children, highlighting gaps and offering suggestions where appropriate.

This project will comprehensively explore privacy within AI systems, especially focusing on the perspectives of young digital citizens, while ensuring the protection of children's privacy rights.

The aim of the project is to investigate, through a comprehensive and systematic technical/experimental measurement study, the ecosystem of social login in websites and Android apps.

This research will explore that negative effects of deceptive design on user information privacy in commercial VR applications. By identifying and classifying deceptive design patterns in VR that undermine and subvert users’ privacy, the researchers seek to develop countermeasures and guidelines to counteract their negative impact, increase awareness, and provide design and policy guidelines and recommendations to VR developers, policymakers, and government.

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence Facial Recognition Technology (AI-FRT) in the private and public sectors has been plagued by issues of privacy as well as racial and gender bias, as the technology regularly misidentifies or fails to identify individuals of a particular gender or race. This research project seeks to examine and identify the race, gender and privacy issues related mainly to the development of AI-FRT by the private sector in Canada, and its use by both the private and public sectors in Canada. Other objectives of the research include to develop a framework and guidelines to address race, gender and privacy impacts arising from the development and deployment of AI-FRT by private sector developers in Canada; to identify possible reform of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) to legislatively address race, gender and privacy impacts arising from private sector development and deployment of AI-FRT; to collaborate with the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Center (ACLRC) to increase public understanding and awareness of race, gender and privacy impacts of AI-FRT through webinars, workshops and publication of research papers; and to strengthen research capacity in academia by training graduate students to research on race, gender and privacy issues related to AI-FRT.

This project will investigate the ecosystem of virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) e-commerce, retail apps and websites, including virtual try-on, virtual makeup and beauty apps or websites, and the technological tools that are used by developers of these systems. The researchers will design and implement a privacy and security analysis framework to find and analyze these apps and websites as well as a selected set of their software development tools and libraries. The researchers will produce a public report summarizing the findings of their investigation and presenting recommendations for improving the security and privacy of VR/AR systems. The report will also include some easy-to-follow guidelines for Canadian shoppers who use these apps. The findings of this report will be provided online for free. The researchers will also produce a technical paper detailing their full methodology and results, as well as their technical recommendations.

Extended reality (“XR”) technologies – which include augmented, mixed, and virtual reality – promise to revolutionize many aspects of our lives. Yet, the nature of these technologies’ data collection poses profound new implications for personal privacy. This project will begin with a survey of current XR technologies and anticipated developments to contextualize the privacy concerns surrounding XR hardware. Following the survey, the researchers will undertake a comprehensive study evaluating whether PIPEDA and the proposed CPPA are up to the task of protecting Canadians’ privacy in XR environments. The researchers will explore whether alternative approaches may be required to protect the privacy of Canadians in immersive environments, offering suggestions for Canadian privacy laws to address challenges posed by XR technologies.