Philippe Dufresne, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, has found OpenAI was not compliant with Canadian federal and provincial privacy laws in the training of its AI models. Following an investigation, Dufresne and his counterparts in Alberta, Quebec and British Columbia say OpenAI's approach to things like data collection and consent stepped on multiple laws, including Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which governs how companies collect and use personal information during the normal course of business. The commissioners participating in the investigation identified multiple privacy issues with OpenAI's approach, including that the company gathered vast amounts of personal information without adequate safeguards to prevent use of that information to train its models, and that it failed to acquire consent to collect and use that personal information in the first place. Warnings in ChatGPT note that interactions with the AI could be used in training, but third-party data OpenAI has purchased or scraped also includes personal details people likely aren't even aware of. The fact that ChatGPT users have no way to access, correct or delete that data was another issue that the commissioners identified, according to a summary of the investigation's findings, along with OpenAI's lackluster attempts to acknowledge the inaccuracy of some of ChatGPT's responses.

Australia's privacy watchdog has launched an inquiry into how TikTok harvests personal data and whether it is being done with consent. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) will examine whether the social media platform has breached the online privacy of Australians through the use of marketing pixels, which track people's online habits. This can include where they shop, how long they stay on websites and personal information, such as email addresses and mobile phone numbers. Liberal senator James Paterson, who has been campaigning against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, has alleged the social media platform is using pixels to collect information of non-TikTok users. "This conduct would be unacceptable from any company but is particularly alarming given TikTok is beholden to the Chinese Communist party and is required under China's intelligence laws to share information with Chinese government intelligence agencies," Paterson said.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating OpenAI's generative language app ChatGPT after the watchdog received a complaint claiming the software was collecting, using, and disclosing personal information without consent. "AI technology and its effects on privacy is a priority for my Office," the country's privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne declared in a statement this week. "We need to keep up with – and stay ahead of – fast-moving technological advances, and that is one of my key focus areas as commissioner." Launched last November, ChatGPT went viral as hundreds of millions of netizens flocked to the free tool to generate all types of text. While it may be fun to get the engine to write bad jokes or essay drafts, authorities are growing increasingly concerned about the privacy risks the technology poses.

Artificial Intelligence: The Year in Review Canada January 16 2018 By all accounts, "Maple Valley" is thriving. Based on available data to date, it is estimated that funding raised by Canadian AI companies in 2017 will exceed US$250 million, representing an almost two-fold increase from the previous record historical high of US$143 million in 2015. Notably, the 2017 federal budget provided for C$125 million in research and development funds earmarked for AI initiatives and nearly C$1 billion over 5 years to promote innovation superclusters. Joining dozens of growing start-ups in AI cluster cities such as Toronto or Montreal, global tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Samsung have invested in or opened Canadian AI labs in 2017. As we begin the new year, we pause to reflect on some of 2017's most notable developments in AI and prepare for new trends to watch out for in 2018.

Late last month, the Toronto Police Services Board released a new policy meant to guide the agency's future procurement and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for law enforcement. The 4,800-word document, now posted on the TPSB's website, is the product of a fairly extensive canvas of public and expert opinion, and said to be the first such governance framework for any Canadian law enforcement agency. It consists of a general statement about guiding principles and an articulation of the policy's purpose, as well as 21 separate operational provisions divided into four broad categories: review and assessment of new AI technologies; board approval and reporting prior to procurement, utilization and deployment; monitoring and reporting; and continuous review. As with all matters policing, the board -- which consists of elected and appointed civilians -- sets the policy at a high level, while the chief of police is responsible for carrying it out and then reporting back to the TPSB on how things are going. On paper, an elegant arrangement, more often honoured in the breach than the observance, as the saying goes.

Three provincial privacy watchdogs have ordered facial recognition company Clearview AI to stop collecting, using and disclosing images of people without consent. The privacy authorities of British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec are also requiring the U.S. firm to delete images and biometric data collected without permission from individuals. The binding orders made public Tuesday follow a joint investigation by the three provincial authorities with the office of federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien. The watchdogs found in February that Clearview AI's facial recognition technology resulted in mass surveillance of Canadians and violated federal and provincial laws governing personal information. They said the New York-based company's scraping of billions of images of people from across the internet to help police forces, financial institutions and other clients identify people was a clear breach of Canadians' privacy rights.

The facial recognition app Clearview AI is not welcome in Canada and the company that developed it should delete Canadians' faces from its database, the country's privacy commissioner said on Wednesday. "What Clearview does is mass surveillance, and it is illegal," Commissioner Daniel Therrien said at a news conference. He forcefully denounced the company as putting all of society "continually in a police lineup." Though the Canadian government does not have legal authority to enforce photo removal, the position -- the strongest one an individual country has taken against the company -- was clear: "This is completely unacceptable." Clearview scraped more than three billion photos from social media networks and other public websites in order to build a facial recognition app that is now used by over 2,400 U.S. law enforcement agencies, according to the company.

Centralized state camera surveillance is but one component of a burgeoning practice of personal data collection paired with artificial intelligence (AI). Camera surveillance is not inherently unlawful and has long been used at border-crossings, airports, and other high-security areas. However, recent technological advances have contributed to the spread of a more intrusive form of video surveillance that includes powerful, if imperfect, facial recognition abilities and AI decision making. While the technology offers states the ability to, among other things, identify lost children, identify criminals, and monitor threats, the new capacity also raises significant human rights issues. The use of camera surveillance has grown with leaps in technology, including the introduction of videocassette recorders in the 1970s and the internet in the 1990s.

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents numerous opportunities to benefit society; however, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OIPC), together with numerous international counterparts, have been urging the adoption of national strategies to ensure the responsible use of AI and mitigate the risks to privacy and data associated with same. Recognizing that AI poses challenges to privacy, data protection and human rights, the Declaration on Ethics and Data Protection in Artificial Intelligence was adopted at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners. This Declaration aims to "preserve human rights in the development of artificial intelligence" by endorsing the following six guiding principles: While the OIPC continues to monitor AI developments in Canada and internationally, the Government of Canada has also been active in addressing potential issues arising from the use of such technologies. For example, Canada is among the first countries to announce a national strategy for AI. The Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, a $125-million investment in AI, was announced in the 2017 Federal Budget, with a main objective of supporting research on AI.

QUAYSIDE, an area of flood-prone land stretching for 12 acres (4.8 hectares) on Toronto's eastern waterfront, is home to a vast, pothole-filled parking lot, low-slung buildings and huge soyabean silos--a crumbling vestige of the area's bygone days as an industrial port. Many consider it an eyesore but for Sidewalk Labs, an "urban innovation" subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet, it is an ideal location for the world's "first neighbourhood built from the internet up". Sidewalk Labs is working in partnership with Waterfront Toronto, an agency representing the federal, provincial and municipal governments that is responsible for developing the area, on a $50m project to overhaul Quayside. It aims to make it a "platform" for testing how emerging technologies might ameliorate urban problems such as pollution, traffic jams and a lack of affordable housing. Its innovations could be rolled out across an 800-acre expanse of the waterfront--an area as large as Venice.