Opening remarks by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at the OPC’s 2025 Privacy Symposium – Youth privacy in a digital age

June 20, 2025
Ottawa, Ontario

Address by Philippe Dufresne
Privacy Commissioner of Canada

(Check against delivery)

---

Good morning, and welcome to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s 2025 Privacy Symposium on Youth privacy in a digital age.

Thank you for joining us for what promises to be a very interesting day of discussion.

Thank you to each and every one of you for taking the time to be here to share your experiences and views on what is an increasingly pressing issue.

Globally, increased focus and concern for the privacy of young people are driving the development of new laws, regulations, guidelines, and initiatives by governments and data protection authorities around the world that are aimed at protecting children’s privacy.

This trend recognizes the unique sensitivities around young people’s privacy and the need to ensure that their rights are protected.

Children and youth are spending a significant portion of their lives online, a context that many of us did not experience growing up.

The online world offers young people unprecedented opportunities for innovation, creativity, self-expression, and engagement, but it also presents significant privacy risks.

Embracing new technologies increases their risk of being targeted, manipulated or harmed online.

As a father of young adults, I have marveled at how different the world is now than when I was their age. I also know that the digital environment is evolving so rapidly that the world that my children navigated in high school is different than the one that today’s teens are dealing with.

My generation had the privilege of growing up without having to worry about who was tracking our actions, and without the possibility that our childhood and adolescent moments would be documented and sometimes made available to the whole world. We were able to have a childhood and be children before we were held to the standards of adults. Today’s youth also deserve this.

We all want to ensure that young people can experience youth in an environment that is safe. An environment where the things that they say and do are not tracked, or used against them. One where one action is not caught like a fly in amber, and then found and exploited over and over again.

Supporting young people in this digital age is a priority that I know all of us in this room share, likely with a similar sense of urgency around this issue.

It is important that children and youth have the skills to be active digital citizens. For this they need to be able to explore and experiment online with power and autonomy, knowing that it is a safe space for them.

Earlier this year, my Office conducted a survey of parents and educators. Let me give you a few highlights:

• The survey found that the vast majority of parents worry about their children’s online privacy.
• Two-thirds or more were moderately to extremely concerned, and
• 45% were highly concerned about risks to their child from the use or misuse of their personal information.

All of this underlines the fact that today’s youth are caught in a difficult situation – their world requires them to be online, but doing so also presents risks that are evolving quickly, and with repercussions still unknown.

This is not an issue that any of us can address on our own. It is complex, continuously evolving, and spans multiple domains across many jurisdictions.

At such a critical time, we need to work collaboratively with the best interests of the child as our starting point.

Article 16 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child says that “No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation. The child has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”

The goal of this symposium is to bring your collective expertise together – youth to share your perspectives, parliamentarians, policy makers, scholars, representatives from civil society and industry, along with domestic and international privacy regulators, to unpack the important issues related to the protection of children’s privacy, now and into the future.

I am looking forward to the discussions of our expert panels. And I am especially excited about today’s first panel, where we will hear from four impressive young people about what they want, and need, in order to benefit from technology without compromising their well-being.

Young people must be part of the conversation to identify solutions to the issues that they are facing in their day-to-day lives.

To that end, I am proud to announce that I will be establishing a Youth Advisory Council for the OPC. The aim is to create an avenue for young people to share their insights, experiences, and ideas on the privacy issues that matter the most to them. Their voices will play an important role in deepening our understanding of how these issues impact young people, which will help to inform our efforts where they can have the most impact.

The call for applications was just launched today on our website, and I invite all of you to encourage any passionate and thoughtful young Canadians who are interested in technology, privacy, and shaping the digital world to apply.

Knowledge of privacy is not a pre-requisite. Ideal candidates will be comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas in discussions with both peers and adults and passionate about helping their communities.

I will close with the following thoughts: Children deserve to be children, even in the digital realm, free from deceptive practices and with the freedom to navigate online spaces securely.

We want organizations to respect children’s privacy rights and to design services and products with strong protections for the personal information of children.

And we want children and parents to be empowered with knowledge about the implications of their privacy choices, building a new generation with strong and inherent privacy awareness.

This is essential to ensure that children still have the freedom just to be young and carefree. The freedom to be kids – in this increasingly digital and data-driven world.

Thank you again for being here and for being a part of this important discussion.