New technologies and organizations’ practices are regularly placing pressures and challenges on our privacy and transparency rights. This month, Civic Tech Toronto and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario are highlighting the work to defend, enforce, explain and update these rights. To see all September events, check our events listing on Guild.

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Topic: 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.

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Speaker: Sara M. Grimes, PhD [joining remotely]

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. // LinkedIn / kidsplaytech.com

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Agenda:

7:00-7:20 Welcome and Introductions

7:20-7:50 Presentation and Q&A/discussion

7:50-9:00 Breakout groups

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Code of Conduct: https://civictech.ca/about-us

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Check in with us on the Civic Tech Toronto Slack: https://link.civictech.ca/chat

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About Us:

Our weekly civic meetups bring together Torontonians (designers, coders, urban planners, government staff, mappers, policy-makers, students, communications strategists, community organizers, and more) who share an interest in making Toronto more responsive, prosperous, sustainable, and equitable through design, tech, and data.

Come and be part of it!

For more info: https://civictech.ca

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Interested in speaking at a future event, or know someone who'd be a great speaker? We'd love to hear from you:

https://link.civictech.ca/speaker-suggestions

Have a space that could host up to 80 civic-minded folks for an evening? Consider recommending your venue:

https://link.civictech.ca/venue-suggestions

Venue Entrances:

From Bloor St or subway concourse, or from Yonge St (just beside Jack Astor's)