Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to address what constitutes youth online privacy, how youth conceive of their privacy, whether their privacy needs protecting, and, if so, how youth privacy should be regulated online. First, the article begins by rooting the issue of online youth privacy in the current social, technological, economic, political, and legal context, drawing on social science research to demonstrate both the threats and opportunities created by technology for youth privacy.\nSecond, the analysis focuses on the relative strengths and weaknesses of current federal legislation as the primary law governing the collection, use, and disclosure of youth’s personal information through their online activities, including their use of social networks and mobile applications or “apps.” Under the Constitution Act, 1867, privacy is not explicitly assigned to the provinces or the federal government. Depending on the context, privacy may affect provincial domain over property and civil rights, or the federal power over trade and commerce. However, aside from British Columbia, Alberta, and Quebec, which have passed “substantially similar” legislation to the federal government, the federal statute applies to all private organizations across the country that collect information in the course of a commercial activity, even if they only carry on business in a single province. Practically speaking, to the extent commercial websites collect young people’s information across interprovincial or international borders, they are going to be governed by the federal statute, in recognition of the federal government’s power to regulate interprovincial and international trade. It is worth noting that Canadian jurisprudence on youth privacy online is underdeveloped by virtue of the fact that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) generally diverts such grievances from the judicial system. Even then, the Privacy Commissioner has so far only conducted one investigation into a website that specifically targets youth. Accordingly, the Commissioner’s report into the complaint against Nexopia.com, a Canadian-made social network, figures prominently in this analysis. It serves as a case study of how federal privacy legislation is applied in practice, and an example by which the effectiveness of the existing regime may be evaluated.\nThird, after canvassing the shortcomings of the current legal regime, I consider proposals for reform and assess their merits. This analysis draws on the legislative experience of the United States, both as a possible model for reform and as a cautionary tale. Given that many of the world’s most popular websites among youth originate in the US, that country’s Congress has arguably had a greater influence on the information practices and privacy policies affecting Canadian youth than any other. Finally, I offer an alternative legal solution to give more meaningful expression to youth privacy rights, while avoiding the paradigmatic trap of most existing proposals.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".