Announcement

Real Results: OPC-funded research looks at the impacts of artificial intelligence on privacy

The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI), and the impact that this has on daily life, has been a focus of many research projects funded by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) over the past few years.

Addressing privacy impacts of the fast-moving pace of technological advancement, especially in the world of AI and generative AI, is a strategic priority for the OPC.

The latest volume of Real Results, a periodical featuring some of the projects funded by the OPC’s Contributions Program, contains articles about recent projects that deal with various questions sparked by AI:

• A Q&A with Timothy Caulfield from the University of Alberta, who led a team studying the privacy impacts of AI applications in healthcare.
• An interview with Noah Zon, a lead researcher with the Canadian Standards Association (CSA Group), who looked at privacy risks for children given the scope and scale of data collected by AI from the systems, applications – and even the toys – that they use.
• A review of the research from the Internet Society of Quebec, led by Destiny Tchéhouali, into how Canadians perceive content recommendation algorithms of online platforms such as Spotify, YouTube or Netflix: are they really our alter egos in the digital environment, and, if so, do these alter egos respect our privacy or invade it?

Each year, the OPC provides up to $500,000 in funding for independent privacy research and related knowledge translation initiatives through its Contributions Program.

Real Results — Vol. 4