Philippe Dufresne, who heads the Office of the Privacy Commission of Canada, sat down with MLex on the sidelines of an international privacy conference for an exclusive interview on his view of possible next steps in the OPC's litigation against Facebook, and his view of the potential of Canada adopting a ban on social media use by young teenagers, as Australia has done.
If Facebook loses its challenge to a lower-court decision currently being considered by the Supreme Court of Canada, the nation's Privacy Commissioner expects to begin negotiations on a remedy that he said could include both fines and user-consent changes.The Supreme Court heard oral argument last month in Facebook’s challenge to a 2024 decision by the Federal Court of Appeal that the social media giant violated Canada’s commercial privacy law, with the justices often sounding sympathetic to the OPC’s argument that the appellate court got it right (see here).
If the Supreme Court affirms the Court of Appeal's decision, Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne told MLex this week that the next step would be a negotiation with the company, now known as Meta Platforms but referred to as Facebook in the case’s legal filings.
“I look forward to, if that is the outcome, that there would then be some fruitful discussions to get to a remedy, to provide closure on this important issue,” said Dufresne, speaking exclusively to MLex on the sidelines of one of the world’s largest annual privacy gatherings* in Washington, DC.
Asked if the remedy could include fines or changes to how Meta obtains the consent of Canadians to collect and process data, Dufresne said there “could be a combination of things” in the remedy.
“I think my priority is to make sure that the consent is obtained in the right way, that Canadians have a good understanding of what's happening with their data. What's the protection? Is it appropriate? And then we can consider what has been done in other jurisdictions,” Dufresne said. “My goal was to make sure that Canadians have equivalent levels of protection as existed elsewhere.”
The litigation between the OPC and Facebook dates to 2020 (see here), resulting from the global Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal that erupted in 2018. That scandal was the result of Facebook’s policy prior to 2015 that apps on its platform could access the personal data not only of people who downloaded the app, but also the Facebook friends of people who downloaded an app.
The OPC alleged that policy violated consent requirements of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, or PIPEDA. Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the OPC in the case in 2024 (see here).
“We feel that the Federal Court of Appeal got it right,” Dufresne said. If the Supreme Court agrees, “then there'd be a discussion with Facebook on what's the appropriate remedy.”
Canada is one of a number of countries that is starting to discuss a ban on social media use for teens, similar to what Australia has done (see here). Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters last month that “this is something that merits an open and considered debate in Canada.”
Asked about a ban, Dufresne referred to the OPC’s action against TikTok in 2025, in which the social media app committed to stricter privacy settings for children aged 17 and under after an investigation by the federal authority and its provincial counterparts in Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta (see here).
“There's lots of debates in Parliament about whether certain sites should have limited access for kids,” he said. “Social media is sort of the broad category, but there's lots of discussions about pornographic websites and whether we should require age assurance, age verification. I've taken a position that that would be appropriate, that we can have both age assurance in a privacy-protective way and protect children.”
The Canadian enforcement required TikTok “to keep underage kids under 13 off that platform, and that TikTok’s failure to do that successfully, with stringent mechanisms, was a violation of the law and had to be remedied,” Dufresne said.
“You also have to, again, look at the best interest of children, making sure that they can have agency, that they can have access to what they need. But I know that there's certainly growing reflection and awareness of the impact of social media sites, and we've had the recent judgments here in the US in the last week,” Dufresne said, referring to the social media verdicts in California and New Mexico against Meta and YouTube (see here and here). “So I think that conversation is going to continue.”
The OPC recently, along with 26 other data protection and privacy authorities in Canada and other countries, announced the conclusion of a global privacy sweep of child-friendly practices on websites and apps (see here).
For the most part, the results were good, Dufresne said, but not completely.
“There's some things that can be worked on, in particular, the ease at which people are circumventing the age verification mechanisms that are there,” Dufresne said. “So we found that to be problematic, and that's something which the sweep can do is to call this out. OK, people need to step up. Those mechanisms are not strong enough.”
*IAPP Global Summit 2026: Privacy-AI Governance, Washington, DC, March 30-April 2, 2026.
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