PEPR '25: 2025 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect

Phillip Ward, Canva


Canva's mission is to empower the world to design. A major challenge to that mission is securing the data required to build the AI-powered tools that modern professionals love. This is not just the newest and fanciest generative-AI tools. Even the humble background remover and template library search functions require data that represents our user community in order to perform at the level our users expect. To create the best experience for users, this data must be as unique and diverse as our community, and as we scale, data from our growing community is essential to building a better product. However, no one can do their best creative work if they do not feel safe and empowered. We want our users to experience high quality protection for their personal information and personal creations, so every use of their content must be carefully considered. In this talk, I will outline the AI consent platform that we have built. I will share how Canva built an end-to-end ecosystem to simultaneously empower users to control their data and power the next generation of AI tools. This ecosystem spans from the user experience of providing consent, to the controls and platforms that ensure our 100+ models respect user consent every day.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr25/presentation/ward