Ban the Kid, Keep their Data

Governments in Canada and abroad are moving to protect children online: banning kids from social media, mandating safer defaults, restricting what platforms can recommend to young users. Much of it depends on first establishing how old users are. In this talk, Sara Grimes looks at the infrastructure these proposals routinely require, including AI-driven facial estimation and behavioural inference, applied to everyone, collecting more data from children in the name of protecting them. She’ll ask what the evidence says about whether these technologies work and what their spreading implementation means for children’s privacy and other rights.

Speakers

Sara M. Grimes

Sara Grimes is a full professor in Communication Studies at McGill University, where she holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy and directs the Kids Play Tech Lab. For over two decades she has tracked how digital games and social media platforms collect data from young users, and how policy and design decisions quietly shape what rights children get to exercise. She’s the author of Digital Playgrounds (University of Toronto Press, 2021) and co-author of the CIFAR policy brief Responsible AI and Children. She regularly works with policymakers in Canada and internationally on children’s privacy.