Will Canada’s AI industry be undermined by Facebook data scandal?

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is sending a chill through Canada’s artificial intelligence community, with some players worried that public concerns about privacy could threaten a sector that relies heavily on data.

“It cannot stop. Everything, all the forces have aligned. The right investments have been made. Data needs to be available,” said Foteini Agrafioti, chief science officer for RBC and head of Broealis AI, RBC’s artificial intelligence research lab. “It’s no time to back down, just because we hear problem cases in the media.”

That sentiment was echoed by Kevin Peesker, president of Microsoft Canada. He said the “wake-up call” on personal privacy is a good thing, but people need to understand the benefits of artificial intelligence too, and he warned about the downside of too much regulation.

“I think it’s impossible to legislate for everything without having significant negative consequences that constrain,” Peesker said. “There’s a benefit from aggregating the data.”

Peesker and Agrafioti were speaking on a panel discussing AI issues Thursday morning at the Public Policy Forum Canada Growth Summit in Toronto.

Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest topics in the Canadian tech world right now, but the technology relies entirely on huge amounts of data.

That data is fed into computers, which can then “learn” to perform a specific task by running through potential scenarios over and over again.

Canada is a world leader in this kind of work, and it’s an area the government wants to grow.

But right now, the tech world is grappling with a privacy backlash and prospects of increased government regulation over data usage in the wake of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Cambridge Analytica reportedly obtained the data of around 87 million Facebook users and used that data to attempt to psychologically profile users, ultimately working to influence the U.S. presidential election in favour of Donald Trump.

Since the news broke in March, Facebook has made changes to its platform, which limits the abilities of applications to access user data, and governments are responding to calls for regulation to control how corporations collect and use personal data.