Children’s digital privacy is often discussed as a consumer issue – a matter of parental settings, better consent notices or cleaner app design. That framing is now too small.  

In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), children’s privacy should be treated as critical public infrastructure. That may sound like a stretch, but it is not. Infrastructure is what societies rely on every day to make other essential systems work safely and fairly. We understand this instinctively for drinking water, school transportation and vaccination records. The same logic now applies to data about children.

AI systems increasingly shape what children see, how they learn, how they are classified, what risks they face online, and how public and private institutions interact with them. If those systems collect too much, infer too much, retain too much or expose children to harm, the damage is not limited to one bad app.

It weakens trust across education, public services and digital life more broadly. The OECD’s 2025 report How’s Life for Children in the Digital Age? makes it plain that digital services bring both opportunities and significant risks, while UNICEF’s 2025 guidance on AI and children argues that child-centred AI governance must include safety, transparency, fairness and the explicit protection of children’s data and privacy.

AI in the classroom is here. A policy patchwork is failing Canadian students The AI literacy gap facing Gen Alpha

AI in the classroom is here. A policy patchwork is failing Canadian students

The AI literacy gap facing Gen Alpha

Public infrastructure is not only concrete and steel. It is also the set of invisible conditions that make safe participation in society possible.

The federal government should act in four key interconnected areas to achieve this by ensuring: any child-facing AI app undergoes a........

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