Karen Louise Smith, Communication, Popular Culture and Film, Brock University

Regulatory offices such as the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) and Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC) regularly receive privacy complaints from the public. Youth can file complaints directly, or parents, educators, and other trusted adults may act on their behalf. Taking an expansive view of youth privacy advocacy—including individuals under 30 and those in post-secondary education—this paper critically examines examples of youth privacy complaints in Canada. It addresses three questions: What significant youth privacy complaint precedents exist? How are youth involved in the privacy complaints? And how do intersectional identity factors like age influence the content of the privacy complaints and the responses from regulators, technology companies, or other stakeholders? Empirical examples to explore in this paper include the 2008 Facebook complaint filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), involving law student interns. Additionally, a recent online proctoring complaint from a university student that led to a 2024 IPC decision that addressed issues like consent and AI use in processing student data will be analyzed. Through exploration of youth privacy complaints, this paper aims to deepen understanding of intersectional privacy advocacy and enhance future possibilities for youth involvement in privacy regulation.

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Felicia De Sousa, Criminology, Ontario Tech University

This paper examines body-worn cameras (BWCs) to challenge common assumptions about the benefits of increased surveillance. It explores the nature of BWCs and society’s fascination with this technological advancement, focusing on how the “new visibility” they create influences police discretionary decision-making. Increased visibility can shift officers toward formal justice responses, reducing the use of discretion and informal mechanisms, and ultimately leading to higher levels of enforcement activity. Using a mixed-methods synthesis approach, this paper highlights how the heightened self-awareness prompted by BWCs encourages normative behaviour. Within policing, such normative behaviour often aligns with increased enforcement, as officers adhere to expected standards. By emphasizing the critical role of discretion, this paper underscores the importance of considering how heightened enforcement affects public perception of the police, which can in turn undermine police legitimacy. Because interactions between the police and the community are central to effective policing, increased surveillance can alter these dynamics in ways that erode trust and transparency, ultimately weakening community–police relations. To counter this, the paper concludes by recommending a stronger emphasis on community engagement and partnerships rather than a fixation on meeting quotas, in order to preserve police legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

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Mackenzie Rockbrune, Social Justice and Equity Studies, Brock University

This study examines first-year undergraduate students’ awareness, experiences, and perceptions of generative artificial intelligence (AI) deepfakes within the context of technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV) at Brock University, a Canadian post-secondary institution. As generative AI technologies continue to advance, AI-facilitated gender-based and sexual violence is becoming more prevalent but remains insufficiently addressed in institutional policies and educational frameworks.

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Rebekah Gold, Child and Youth Studies, Brock University

Lulu Larcenciel, Child and Youth Studies, Brock University

Digital citizenship is widely framed as a set of rights, responsibilities, and competencies exercised through digital technologies, emphasizing access, participation, safety, and civic engagement (Rahman, 2025; Webster, 2025). This presentation, an extension of Dr. Chelsea Jones’ RelaxComm project, suggests that dominant conceptualizations of digital citizenship operate as a regulatory discourse that governs disabled/crip young people out of full participation. Normative frameworks rely on assumptions about access, productivity, and technological literacy that reproduce ableist expectations of the “ideal” digital citizen and obscure the structural conditions that shape disabled digital life (van Toorn & Cox, 2024). In this way, these discourses shape who can participate, how participation is recognized, and whose digital practices are valued.

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Alexander Waworuntu, Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo

In this digitized global economy, no other form of entertainment has exploded in popularity so rapidly as much as video games. Traditionally dominated by markets in the Global North, this industry is increasingly growing in popularity in the Global South. Of note, governments throughout Southeast Asia are increasingly showing interest in building their own domestic video game industries.

This phenomenon presents a puzzle in the global political economy. Rapid economic development has often been associated with state-led developmentalism, in which governments take interventionist roles in directing their economies. While scholarly attention has focused on government support towards capital-intensive heavy industries, video games present a unique departure: not only does this industry straddle between creative arts and high-technology sectors, its transnational and complex nature problematizes how states capture value. Understanding this can shed light on how state-led developmentalism is adapting in unexpected ways in the digital age.

Why are Southeast Asian governments increasingly seeing their video game industries as an important industry to support? How does government support to this industry challenge existing understanding of state-led developmentalism? This dissertation explores Singapore and Indonesia as case studies, examining their policies, legal frameworks, and government initiatives towards their respective video game industries.

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Tanner Mirrlees, Communication and Digital Media Studies, Ontario Tech University

While scholars have examined the entanglements between the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and America’s “Big Tech” companies such as Alphabet-Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, there is a lack of comparable research on the relations between Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND) and these same U.S.-based Big Tech firms. Consequently, the stakes of the DND’s integration with foreign Big Tech firms remain marginal in Canada’s digital policy and regulatory debates. Motivated by a real need to illuminate DND–Big Tech relations and encourage greater public interest deliberation about this convergence, this paper sheds light on Big Tech’s lobbying of the DND, and the DND’s growing reliance on these firms for its own operational hardware and software services. I argue these cross-border lobbying and procurement practices are consolidating a U.S.-centred military-industrial communications complex (MICC) in Canada, fortifying the power of American platform imperialism and solidifying Canada’s subordinate role as a platform dependency. The DND, the agency tasked with securing Canada, has become a structurally dependent contractor of Big Tech firms. The paper considers the economic and political implications of the asymmetrical platform power relationship cemented by this dependency, including risks to Canada’s digital prosperity, sovereignty, and democracy in the context of deteriorating U.S.–Canadian relations and security threats posed by the Trump presidency’s illiberal imperialism.

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Nicole Goodman, Political Science, Brock University

Holly Ann Garnett, Political Science & Economics, Royal Military College

Pegah Jamalof, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University

This work examines the United Nations Global Digital Compact (UNGDC) as an emerging framework for social media governance. Anchored in Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, it analyzes how global initiatives promote privacy obligations for large social media companies, using Meta as an illustrative case.

The UNGDC has developed alongside growing recognition of the influence wielded by digital technology and debates over the limitations of earlier UN initiatives in addressing said governance challenges. In this context, this work examines the roles of state and non-state actors in shaping privacy-related platform governance.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Digital Services Act (DSA) are prominent reference points for privacy regulation in social media governance. Although EU regulation is often associated with the Brussels Effect, these digital frameworks have exhibited uneven adoption due to regional variation and platform resistance to uniform, platform-wide implementation. This divergence provides a basis for examining how and why the UNGDC aligns or departs from EU-led approaches.

As an early-stage doctoral project, the work adopts an exploratory approach to assessing the constraints and possibilities facing UN-led efforts.

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Alisa Grigorovich, Recreation and Leisure Studies, Brock University

Real-time location systems (RTLS) are increasingly being developed to track the movements and activities of older adults with dementia across health care settings. Specifically, it is believed that such technologies can support automation of care tasks (e.g. locating) and the development of clinical algorithms to predict changes in health and wellbeing. The limited available research suggests that these technologies can have significant ethical implications, including increasing control over older adults, and undermining their rights. In this paper I will share findings from a recent study of an implementation of this type of technology in one long-term care home identifying failure points, ethical tensions, and socio-technical misalignments that led to abandonment. The findings highlight the socio-technical and ethical complexities of implementing surveillance technologies in health care, and underscore the need for robust data governance and other regulatory changes to ensure that technological innovation enhances rather than compromises the quality of care and quality of life.

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Additional Resources:

Berridge C and Grigorovich A (2022) Algorithmic harms and digital ageism in the use of surveillance technologies in nursing homes. Front. Sociol. 7:957246. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2022.957246 https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.957246/full

Marika Jeziorek, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University

This research develops the concept of evaluative governance of belonging to explain how contemporary migration governance increasingly operates through continuous assessment across legal and digital labour-market infrastructures. Focusing on Canada, it argues that access to work, security, and longer-term stability is no longer secured by legal status alone but is instead mediated through ongoing evaluation embedded in digitized immigration administration and algorithmically structured labour markets. Drawing on feminist political economy, migration studies, and critical data scholarship, the research shows how migration policy and digital labour-market systems, while institutionally distinct, increasingly reinforce one another through shared evaluative logics that translate employability, credibility, and deservingness into measurable indicators.

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Natasha Tusikov, Social Science, York University

Marika Jeziorek, PhD Candidate in Global Governance, Wilfrid Laurier University

Critical scholarship on period-tracking apps has mapped privacy harms, data commodification, and cis-normative design, often proposing non-profit alternatives. Yet critiques from outside femtech, on digital humanitarian services, show that tools embedded in aid infrastructures are governed by donor cycles, fragile corporate platforms, and contested accountability. Bringing these conversations together, we propose “humanitarian femtech” as a diagnostic lens for reproductive technologies built in non-profit, activist, or aid-sector contexts. The framework specifies three logics—legitimacy, resource dependence, and accountability—with data justice as a transversal concern. We apply it to four non-commercial period trackers: Oky (UNICEF), Euki (Women Help Women/Ibis RH), Drip (Bloody Health), and HerPride (Big Family 360/SmartRR). By situating period-tracking apps within humanitarian governance, we extend femtech critiques beyond commercialization and surveillance, and insert intimacy and reproduction into digital humanitarianism, a field largely preoccupied with logistics and visibility. We conclude with practical conditions under which humanitarian technologies could advance autonomy and care.

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Additional resources

Jonathan Obar, Communication and Media Studies, York University

Requiring transparency about artificial intelligence (AI) systems (i.e. providing notice) so people can decide whether to consent or dissent must remain fundamental to Canadian AI policy approaches. Supporting these protections will maintain efforts to, as Helen Kennedy and Giles Moss assert, “democratise data power”. This presentation will review and counter critiques of notice-consent mechanisms to encourage policymakers to strengthen these fundamental protections.

Critiques suggest there are difficulties conveying meaningful notice to support meaningful consent. Examples include: a) AI complexities which make it difficult to explain how systems work, and b) the distance between instances of consent and secondary uses of data. Acknowledging these concerns, this presentation will assert that notification of implications should be prioritized and not dismissed due to explainable AI difficulties. Continuous consent mechanisms must be prioritized to ensure individuals are connected to data dossiers and eligibility profiles.

An additional critique suggests group privacy should be prioritized over individual approaches. While group privacy should be supported, individual approaches should also be prioritized to ensure unique experiences and vulnerabilities are the focus of protections.

Language in Canada’s proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act is reviewed in light of the discussion of critiques of notice-consent protections online.

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Andrew Clement, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

Canada’s growing over-dependence on US tech has suddenly become a crisis of national sovereignty in the face of Trump’s aggressive moves against Canada and other erstwhile US allies. Canada’s capacity for effective policy making in the digital arena has atrophied just when remedial action is most urgent. While the federal government is floundering in this area, fortunately there are currently a range of relevant policy research initiatives outside government that if properly resourced and carefully aligned could help fill the policy vacuum in an effective and timely manner.

This paper proposes the establishment of a Canadian Digital Policy Observatory, whose core mission would be to facilitate the effective democratic control of our vital digital ecosystem, free from external interference. While working with government, but at arms-length, and engaging with private and civil society stakeholders, the Observatory would conduct independent research at every level of the digital stack, with a focus on identifying vulnerabilities and remedial policy action options and provide a range of related academic, professional and public education services. With funding from public and private sources, the Observatory would concentrate initially on assisting current initiatives and coordinating their efforts to enhance digital policy outcomes in the public interest.

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Stefan Dolgert, Political Science, Brock University

Are climate activists like Greta Thunberg posing an existential risk to humanity? TESCREAL adherents think so, and are reshaping the digital political landscape to thwart this purported danger. TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singulatarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism) is a newly cohering ideology that sees the future of humanity as inextricably linked with transitioning our biological life into new digital forms, by which we must then spread human consciousness to other planets to avoid eventual extinction (Gebru and Torres 2023). It is backed by many of the wealthiest people on earth (the “new Prometheans” William Connolly [2025]), among them the billionaire patron of JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and it assumes that humanity’s true purpose can be found in expansion into the solar system and beyond. For TESCREALists, that means those future humans populating the universe are infinitely more valuable than the flesh-and-blood humans of the present, and getting to the stars will require radical prioritization and dramatic sacrifices to make us a sufficiently “fit” civilization. I will briefly discuss the eugenics, racism, and elitism that make TESCREAL a form of techno-fascism, but will focus on Peter Thiel’s 2025 lectures on the Antichrist, where he conjures up the spectre of a Thunbergian apocalypse (you read that right), and ponders how Silicon Valley can create the TESCREAL future it seeks to build instead. As the international global order teeters on the brink in 2026, the path forward to yet greater horrors is being plumbed within the TESCREAL imaginary.

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Bradley McNeil, Humanities, McMaster University

International organizations, like the OECD and UN, have recently launched soft-law frameworks that aim to shape global artificial intelligence (AI) norms, attracting attention within digital constitutionalism literature, which examines how normative frameworks seek to safeguard fundamental rights and constrain the power of the private actors that control and operate digital environments. Yet Big Tech corporations increasingly operate as “super-policy entrepreneurs,” (Khanal et al., 2025) in these spaces, leveraging IO-led multilateral/multistakeholder processes to advance governance norms aligned with industry interests rather than human rights.

This paper presentation outlines a new lens for digital constitutionalism, advancing Bui’s (2023) discursive constitutionalism (DC) framework. Whereas liberal, societal, and global constitutionalist accounts typically frame digital constitutionalism as rights-affirming efforts to limit corporate power, DC reconceptualizes it as a discursive process through which governance imaginaries are contested and constructed. The paper argues that IOs function as sites of discursive contest in which Big Tech exercises discursive power to shape the meaning and direction of global AI governance.

Empirically, the study analyzes four major IO AI initiatives: the UN Global Digital Compact, the OECD AI Principles, the Council of Europe’s AI Framework Convention, and the Paris AI Action Summit. Using network analysis and critical discourse analysis, and operationalizing DC’s four dimensions (actors, spaces, actions, and ideas) the paper maps how Big Tech firms intervene across IO venues. Findings reveal cross-institutional discursive convergence around a techno-solutionist, innovation-led, market-centric model of AI governance, indicating normative isomorphism and the discursive capture of IO-based AI governance by Big Tech.

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