York University

Purpose

Artificial intelligence is generating urgent and serious privacy harms for Canadians. Generative AI platforms enable the mass production of non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Online gaming platforms — used by more than half of Canadians, including millions of children — collect vast quantities of personal and behavioural data with limited transparency or meaningful consent. And AI-powered chatbots and agentic AI systems are rapidly accumulating persistent “memory” profiles of users, retaining sensitive personal information across interactions in ways that most Canadians neither understand nor control. This project proposes a harm reduction approach as a practical and principled alternative.