Youth for Privacy

Three outcomes would mark genuine success. First, the Dialogue produces a normative floor that endures even when great-power cooperation falters. REAIM signatories halved between 2023 and 2026, showing that aspirational declarations alone do not survive geopolitical headwinds. The Dialogue must instead identify minimum viable commitments that states cannot easily walk back. Second, the Dialogue institutionalizes meaningful youth participation rather than tokenizing it. About 50% of internet users are under 30, and youth bear the long-term consequences of AI governance choices most directly. A youth advisory mechanism, modeled on the OEWG-ICT youth statements Youth for Privacy contributed to, would make this concrete. Third, the Dialogue connects technical standards to human rights frameworks. AI safety, transparency, and accountability cannot be governed in silos from privacy, freedom of expression, and the right to participate. Success means leaving Geneva with a workplan that explicitly bridges the technical and rights communities, not parallel tracks that never meet.

• Safe, secure and trustworthy AI
• Protection and promotion of human rights
• Transparency, accountability, and human oversight
• AI capacity-building

Youth for Privacy selects these four because they map directly onto where young people are most affected and least heard. Safe and trustworthy AI matters because youth are early adopters and primary subjects of AI systems, ranging from algorithmic recommendation in education to facial recognition in public spaces. Our anti-facial-recognition fashion project Privacy Runway responded directly to surveillance encroaching on youth public life. Capacity-building matters because the digital literacy gap is generational and global. Only a quarter of cybersecurity workers are female, and the Global South remains underrepresented. Through our Data Values Bootcamps in Buenos Aires, San Jose, New York, Seoul and virtually, we have seen how practical AI and privacy training transforms passive users into active digital citizens. Human rights protection matters because AI governance without a rights anchor becomes a technical exercise serving developers rather than users. Transparency and human oversight matter because consent has become a fiction when AI systems ingest personal data at scale.

The most significant gap is non-consensual data capture and the collapse of meaningful consent in the AI era. AI demands ever more of our data, often from people who never agreed to provide it. Smart speakers record conversations in shared spaces. Chatbots ingest entire computer contents for context. Public-space facial recognition captures faces regardless of consent. Generative models train on web-scraped content that creators never licensed. Existing privacy frameworks built around individual notice-and-consent are structurally inadequate when AI systems operate on data drawn from third parties, ambient environments, or aggregated populations. Youth for Privacy sees this collapse most acutely with young people: a generation growing up unable to opt out of being captured. The Dialogue should recognize that AI governance is incomplete without addressing what consent means in environments where data capture is ambient, automatic, and irreversible. This is not just a privacy issue. It is a question of human dignity and the right to develop one's identity without permanent surveillance. We propose the Dialogue add a cross-cutting workstream on ambient data capture and the right to be unrecorded, drawing on existing instruments like UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of AI and emerging jurisprudence on biometric data.

For our sector (youth civil society) two challenges dominate. First, AI-driven labor displacement is hitting the generation entering the workforce. Young people are being asked to invest in skills and education while the destinations for those skills shift faster than curricula can adapt. Entry-level roles in writing, coding, design, and analysis (traditional pathways into professional life) are being automated before young workers gain footholds in them. Without workforce-transition policy that takes generational displacement seriously, the AI revolution will produce a cohort locked out of professional formation. Second, expectations of privacy are changing in ways young people did not choose and cannot easily reverse. A child today generates a permanent data trail before they can consent to it. The opportunity is that youth, as digital natives, are uniquely positioned to design governance frameworks that older generations cannot intuit. Through our partnerships with the ITU AI Skills Coalition, UNODA's #Leaders4Tomorrow program, and the Major Group for Children and Youth, Youth for Privacy has seen that young people produce sharper privacy and AI policy thinking than is often credited, when given access to the rooms. The challenge is that those rooms remain closed by default. The Dialogue can change this by treating youth not as beneficiaries but as governance contributors.

The AI Dialogue's most valuable role is norm-setting under conditions of fading cooperation. Binding treaties on AI are unlikely in the near term given current great-power dynamics. But norms and clear public statements about acceptable and unacceptable AI behavior can do significant work even without enforcement. The nuclear hotline was non-binding yet materially reduced accidental-war risk. Incidents at Sea (1972) was a narrow CBM that survived détente's collapse and became a model for cyber and other domains. The AI Dialogue can play this role by establishing minimum redlines (uses of AI no responsible state should engage in), baseline transparency expectations (what users and the public deserve to know), and shared vocabulary (so "human oversight" or "trustworthy AI" mean the same thing across jurisdictions). Equally important, the Dialogue can serve as a legitimating venue for civil society and youth voices that bilateral or plurilateral processes exclude. When norms emerge from a UN-anchored dialogue with broad participation, they carry weight that closed-door deals cannot. The Dialogue's value is precisely that it is multilateral, public, and inclusive at a moment when those qualities are scarce in international AI governance.

Youth for Privacy recommends three structural changes. First, establish a permanent Youth Advisory mechanism. A one-time youth panel is tokenization, but a standing advisory group with seats in plenary and direct input to the Joint Secretariat is meaningful participation. About half of internet users are under 30. The governance forum should reflect that. We delivered a statement at the OEWG-ICT calling for exactly this, and we are eager to co-facilitate a youth consultation track at the Dialogue. Second, structure stakeholder participation by function rather than category. Civil society, technical community, and private sector should not be siloed in parallel rooms; they should be assigned shared deliverables (e.g., drafting a baseline transparency framework) that force genuine collaboration. Third, hold pre-Dialogue regional consultations in the Global South, hosted by youth and civil society organizations rather than ministries alone. Youth for Privacy has run workshops in Buenos Aires, San Jose, New York, and Seoul through our Data Values Bootcamp partnership with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. That infrastructure exists and can be activated. The Dialogue should not begin in Geneva but it should arrive in Geneva with consultation findings already gathered from communities most affected and least represented.

Go where people already are, rather than expecting them to come to Geneva. Three formats Youth for Privacy recommends: First, embed the Dialogue in non-traditional venues. Run sessions at tech conferences (Web Summit, RightsCon), human rights gatherings, and arts festivals where the UN typically has no presence. AI governance affects creators, artists, and ordinary users so the conversation should happen where they already gather. Second, partner with universities and schools to host satellite consultations. Y4P's workshops in universities and high schools around the world have shown that university-hosted formats reach young people who would never travel to Geneva but generate sharp policy input. The Dialogue could establish a network of "Dialogue Partner Campuses" feeding consultation findings into the formal process. Third, use creative formats that match the topic. AI governance is abstract and people engage when it's tangible. Youth for Privacy's anti-AI facial recognition fashion project translated surveillance concerns into wearable art. Hackathons, scenario simulations (a "wargame" of AI escalation), live red-teaming of AI systems with policymakers in the room, and youth-led artistic interventions can communicate stakes that white papers cannot.

Youth for Privacy highlights Communal AI, our ongoing project under the UN Foundation Next Generation Fellowship. Communal AI builds community-based AI infrastructure through community centers and local libraries, using open-source models running on community-owned hardware. The approach addresses two governance failures simultaneously: (1) the centralization of AI capabilities in a small number of profit-driven corporations, and (2) the digital literacy gap that leaves communities unable to meaningfully consent to or shape AI deployment. Through partnerships with libraries, we transform existing civic infrastructure into digital governance hubs: residents learn AI literacy, run local models on community hardware, and set their own content moderation policies through democratic deliberation. Our needs assessment with 200+ community members showed nearly 70% concern about data privacy and strong demand for hands-on AI education that existing programs do not provide.