Age-Appropriate Design for Canada: Moving Beyond One-Size-Fits-All Consent

Canada is at a pivotal moment in children’s privacy. Federal reform under Bill C-27, including the proposed Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA), continues to advance, while provinces such as Quebec—through Law 25, which introduces enhanced rights and stricter consent obligations, have already begun reshaping the legal landscape. At the same time, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) continues to identify children’s privacy as a policy and enforcement priority, underscoring the need for a modernized framework that reflects minors’ unique vulnerabilities and developmental needs. OPC Annual Report 2021 , Bill C-27 Overview Quebec Law 25 Summary

Despite this momentum, Canada still lacks a coherent national standard for how children meaningfully consent to digital services. The prevailing model, parental permission for young children and vague capacity assessments for adolescents, no longer aligns with the realities of platform design, behavioural advertising, or the cultural diversity of Canadian families. Children routinely navigate digital ecosystems long before they can appreciate complex data practices, while parents may struggle with opaque settings, limited transparency, and rapidly evolving platform norms. These challenges are intensified for newcomer, Indigenous and other diasporic families who encounter linguistic, cultural, and technological barriers that traditional privacy frameworks do not account for.

A promising path forward is graduated consent: a developmentally aligned, culturally inclusive, rights-respecting framework that adjusts consent obligations as children mature, strengthens parental roles where appropriate, and embeds privacy-protective defaults for services likely to be accessed by minors. This approach recognises that children’s capacities evolve over time and that meaningful protection requires design, governance, and regulatory expectations that evolve alongside them.

This article outlines the logic behind graduated consent, its core pillars, the comparative lessons Canada can draw from international models, and the research needed to responsibly implement such a system.

What Is Graduated Consent?

Graduated consent treats a child’s capacity not as a single threshold but as a continuum. Rather than relying on a binary distinction between “child” and “adult,” it establishes structured age tiers with differentiated duties for platforms and evolving rights for minors. For very young children, parental consent remains essential, supported by strict data-minimisation, robust privacy-by-default settings, and prohibitions on behavioural profiling. For adolescents, the framework expands autonomy, granting greater agency to understand, accept, decline, or revoke consent, while recognising that certain environments, such as schools or health services, require heightened safeguards.

Internationally, the most developed model is the United Kingdom’s Age-Appropriate Design Code, which imposes enforceable obligations on services likely to be accessed by children. The Code requires platforms to align data practices, default settings, profiling limits, and user interfaces with the developmental stage of their users. UK Age-Appropriate Design Code

Canada, so far, has no equivalent framework. Graduated consent could provide the conceptual foundation for building one.

Why Canada Needs This Now

Children’s privacy sits at the centre of Canadian digital governance debates. The OPC has repeatedly called for stronger statutory protection for minors, noting that children face amplified risks related to profiling, behavioural advertising, algorithmic inference, and data permanence. At the same time, parents often lack the information, or the culturally and linguistically accessible tools, needed to support meaningful consent on behalf of their children.

Federal reform under Bill C-27 offers an opportunity to introduce a unified national standard. Yet the current draft CPPA does not provide detailed, age-specific guidance for online services, nor does it differentiate between the needs of a preschool child, a 10-year-old, or a 16-year-old. Provincial divergence compounds this gap. Quebec’s Law 25, for example, imposes some of the strongest consent obligations in Canada, but such protections are not yet harmonized nationwide.

Graduated consent could pave the way for a coherent path forward, one that combines developmental science, technological realities, and Canada’s multicultural digital ecosystem.

Four Pillars of a Graduated Consent Framework

1. Age-Tiered Consent Thresholds with Developmental Checkpoints

A structured tier system, such as ages 0–7, 8–12, 13–15, and 16–17, would provide clarity for platforms and regulators while aligning responsibilities with cognitive and psychosocial development. Younger tiers would require parental authorization, strict data-minimisation, and high privacy defaults; older adolescents would receive greater autonomy and transparency.

This approach reflects international guidance, including UNICEF’s Policy Guidance on AI for Children, which emphasises developmentally appropriate consent mechanisms and safeguards tailored to a child’s evolving capacities. UNICEF Guidance AI Children

2. Cultural Inclusivity by Design

Meaningful consent requires cultural and linguistic accessibility. Interfaces and explanations should be designed to resonate with diverse communities, including South Asian, Indigenous, newcomer, and diasporic families, whose digital practices and privacy expectations differ from mainstream assumptions. This includes multilingual materials, culturally responsive metaphors, and community-centred outreach.

UNESCO’s Guidelines for Inclusive Digital Solutions highlight the importance of design processes that account for diverse cultural contexts and accessibility needs. UNESCO Guidelines.

3. Contextual Safeguards for Institutional Settings

Digital tools used in schools, health services, or social programs require heightened protections. Children in these environments may not be able to freely refuse consent, and data collected in institutional contexts carries long-term risks. The OECD Recommendation on Children in the Digital Environment identifies educational and health contexts as areas requiring enhanced purpose limitation, strict minimisation, and independent oversight.
OECD Recommendation: OECD Instrument

4. Privacy-Preserving Age Verification and Accessible Redress

Age verification systems must be proportionate and non-intrusive, avoiding biometric profiling or excessive data collection.

Robust redress mechanisms are equally essential. Children and families must have clear, simple pathways to access, correct, and delete data, supported by complaint routes such as the OPC’s online process. OPC Complaint Process

Comparative Lessons

United Kingdom

The UK’s Children’s Code remains the strongest example of age-sensitive, design-focused regulation. Its enforceable standards provide a blueprint for Canada to adapt in developing a national framework.

United States

The U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) offers a model of clear parental-consent obligations for under-13s. While limited in scope and outdated in certain respects, COPPA demonstrates the value of unambiguous statutory duties. COPPA Rule

Australia

Australia’s recent developments offer especially timely lessons:

• The Children’s Online Privacy Code, currently being drafted by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), will impose age-specific obligations on platforms likely to be accessed by minors. OAIC Code Overview
• The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 requires platforms to prevent account creation by children under 16, shifting responsibility to platforms rather than parents.
  Government Announcement: https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/media/news/social-media-minimum-age-legislation-passed
• Human Rights Watch describes these reforms as positioning Australia as a potential “global leader” in online child-privacy protections.
  HRW Report: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/12/australia-commits-protecting-childrens-privacy-online

Australia demonstrates how statutory codes, access restrictions, and platform obligations can work together, offering Canada a practical model for integrating privacy-by-default with age-appropriate design.

Research Needs and Next Steps

Implementing graduated consent requires robust empirical and comparative research. Two areas are particularly pressing:

a) Empirical Testing of Consent Interfaces

Canada lacks data on how children and families from different cultural backgrounds understand consent prompts and privacy explanations. UNICEF’s Digital Civic Responsibility research highlights global gaps in inclusivity and user comprehension, underscoring the need for mixed-methods research, community workshops, and design testing. UNICEF Report

b) Comparative Legal and Policy Analysis

Further research should examine how Canada can synthesize international models design standards, U.S. statutory clarity, Australia’s emergent code, within its federal–provincial privacy landscape. This includes integrating Indigenous legal orders and culturally grounded perspectives on consent and data stewardship.

Conclusion

Graduated consent offers Canada a realistic and rights-respecting approach to modernizing children’s digital privacy. It aligns regulatory duties with developmental science, addresses Canada’s cultural diversity, and provides clearer expectations for platforms operating in an increasingly complex digital environment. While no single model provides all the answers, Canada can draw on international lessons, particularly from the UK, U.S., and Australia, to build a framework that is both protective and practical.

With federal reform underway, now is the moment to pilot age-tiered settings, culturally contextualised consent mechanisms, and sector-specific safeguards. A well-designed graduated consent framework can help ensure that Canadian children grow up in a digital ecosystem that respects their rights, supports their autonomy, and reflects the diversity of the communities they live in.