Grants and Contributions

In this project, researchers seek to understand the privacy implications of generative AI technologies in order to inform the application of current and proposed Canadian privacy legislation and privacy-preserving administrative policies and practices, with an emphasis on impacts on minors.

This project will provide a practical introduction to Large Language Models and will explore privacy challenges for legal and policy experts and the role of privacy-enhancing technologies. Researchers will survey legal, policy and technical experts, as well as civil society groups to explore the benefits and opportunities of these technologies. They will also provide recommendations and public education materials.

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.