By Colin Bennett, Opinion, Times Colonist , November 4, 2018
Cambridge Analytica was a symptom of a pervasive belief that elections are now won with data, says Colin Bennett, a political science professor at the University of Victoria. He contends that these practices are far less common in countries that have multi-party systems rooted in elections based on proportional... Read more about @title...
by Laura Ryckewaert, The Hill Times , November 5, 2018
Little has been learned and questions remain after the recent and unprecedented House committee appearance by representatives from Canada’s major political parties, who spoke about and took questions on parties’ collection, use, and protection of personal data, says University of Victoria professor and privacy expert Colin Bennett. Read... Read more about @title...
In the run-up to the 2019 federal election, there needs to be far more transparency about how personal data is captured, processed, mined,... Read more about @title...
Professor, Political Science, University of Victoria, Canada
Colin Bennett received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Wales, and his Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1986 he has taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, where he is now Professor. He has enjoyed Visiting Professorships at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Center for the Study of Law and Society at University of California, Berkeley, the School of Law, University of New South Wales and at the the Law, Science, Technology and Society Centre at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. His research has focused on the comparative analysis of surveillance technologies and privacy protection policies at the domestic and international levels. In addition to numerous scholarly and newspaper articles, he has published six books, including The Governance of Privacy (MIT Press, 2006) and The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance (MIT Press, 2008), and policy reports on privacy protection for Canadian and international agencies. He is co-investigator of a large Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant entitled “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting” which has culminated in the report: Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada. He is also currently researching the capture and use of personal data by political parties in Western democracies.
As a co-investigator of the Big Data Surveillance project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Colin Bennett is co-leading (with Kirstie Ball) research Stream Two: Marketing. This stream will examine how massive data accumulation, analytical techniques and applications associated with big data are reconstructing practices of consumer marketing and political campaigning.
Report "Beyond Big Data Surveillance: Freedom and Fairness" sheds light on big data surveillance in Canada To read the report in English, go here To read the report in French,... Read more about @title...
