University of Victoria

Jesse Gordon held a BDS student internship as a Jr. Policy Analyst with BDS Partner the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (OIPC BC) from May to August 2018. Gordon assisted the office in collecting evidence in investigating the case of Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate IQ, and Facebook. To read about his experience there, see page 10 of the SSC Annual Newsletter, Issue 7 (June 2019).

Smith Oduro-Marfo is at the tail end of his dissertation project of the connections between citizen identification systems, surveillance and development in Ghana. The project is drawing on interviews, archival data and documents to understand how development is used as justification for projects in the Global South, such as national biometric IDs, SIM registration and digital addressing, and the implications for surveillance as theory and practice. Smith was recently awarded the IAPP's Alan Westin Privacy Scholar award. Together with Jessica Percy-Campbell and Lynn Ng Yu Ling, Smith was also awarded a fellowship grant for their research paper on the collection of race-identified data of COVID 19 patients in Canada.  He is currently part of the CPSA's jury for the association's Teaching Excellence Award.

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.